Mind's Eye: A Liberal Arts Journal 2013

2013

Mind's Eye

A Liberal Arts Journal Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

learning and teach i ng-
Inside and Outside the
Classroom

Editorial Board

Dale Borman Fink, Guest Editor
Frances Jones-Sneed, Managing Editor
Robert Bence
Sumi Colligan
MarkD. Miller
Melanie Mowinski

Leon Peters
Jennifer L. Zoltanski

Karen Howard, Copy Editor

Advisory Board

James MacGregor Burns, Professor of History and Political Science,
University of Maryland
Stephen Fix, Professor of English, Williams College
Tony Gengarelly, Professor of Art History, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Thomas Green, Professor of Law and History, University of Michigan
Mary Huber, Carnegie Foundation Scholar
Lea Newman, Professor of English Emerita, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Joseph Thompson, Director of MASS MoCA

©2013 The Mind's Eye
ISSN 1098-0512

http://www.mcla.mass.edu/Publications/
Faculty_Publications/The_Minds_Eye_spr

The Mind's Eye, a journal of scholarly and creative work, is published annually by
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. While emphasizing articles of scholarly merit,
The Mind's Eye focuses on a general communication of ideas of interest to a liberal arts
college. We welcome expository essays, including reviews, as well as fiction, poetry and
art. Please refer to the inside back cover for a list of writer's guidelines.

A yearly subscription to The Mind's Eye is $7.50. Send check or money order to The
Mind's Eye, c/o Frances Jones-Sneed, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, 375 Church
Street, North Adams, MA 01247.

2 The Mind's Eye

Mind's Eye

2013

IN THIS ISSUE 4

ARTICLES:

Reconstructing the University Classroom as if It Were a Preschool

Dale Borman Fink 6

Architecture and the Art of Discovery

Gideon Fink Shapiro 16

Excerpts from A World Transformed: The Art of Jessica Park

Tony Gengarelly 22

A Storm of Exceptions: On Being a 21st Century Artist-Teacher

Greg Scheckler 30

Undergraduate Happiness: Some Preliminary Field Notes from the Classroom
Jennifer Zoltanski 47

Reflections on the Craft of Teaching

Glenn A. Crosby 61

How Do You Learn Science?

Nick Stroud 67

Teaching and Learning with Henry Giroux

Seth Kershner 70

Gold and the Night Watchman's Daughter

Ben Jacques 78

POETRY:

Advice to Students or You Deserve the Fairy Wings

Melissa Quirk Cairns 82

Four Prose Poems. Selections From Eros & Place.

Annie Raskin 86

Educators

Akili Carter 91

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 92

The Mind's Eye 3

From the Editor

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery"

With this quotation from Mark Van Doren, we issued our call for
contributions to this theme issue on learning and teaching. Van
Doren (1894-1972) was a novelist, editor and poet who joined
the Columbia University faculty upon receiving his Ph.D. there in 1920, and
where he continued to teach for 40 years. Among the many students who
revered him were poets Allen Ginsberg and John Berryman.

With Van Doren's words as a jumping-off point, we invited authors to
address learning and teaching at any stage of life, outside classrooms as well
as within them. We are delighted to present a diverse and thought-provoking
palette of responses to our call.

We showcase the work of three poets. The narrative voice in Carter's
poem "Educators" is that of a learner, while Quirk Cairns ("Advice to
Students or You Deserve the Fairy Wings") speaks as a teacher. Raskins
prose poems (selections from a still-in-progress cycle) represent neither side
of this dichotomy, but describe settings and situations in which insight or
understanding may be subtly acquired, with or without intentionality.

Three authors investigate learning and teaching outside the classroom.
Stroud ("How Do You Learn Science?") encounters a mobile teaching
application during a walk in the woods, and builds on this encounter to
envision ever-broader landscapes as venues for learning. Fink Shapiro
("Architecture and Environmental Discovery") compares certain buildings
and landscapes to "unforgettable teachers." He describes spaces that silently
communicate to our senses and sensibilities, and thereby transform our
understandings. Kershner prefaces a dialogue with Henry Giroux ("Teaching
and Learning with Henry Giroux") by recalling the work of C. Wright Mills
on the "cultural apparatus." The author and his interlocutor discuss the ways
in which the "public pedagogy" of the Internet, entertainment industries, and
other cultural interventions may both reshape and marginalize the "education"
students get during their hours of schooling.

4 The Mind's Eye

Two authors examine the influences that can shape a person toward a
life in art. An excerpt from a forthcoming book by Gengarelly (A World
Transformed: The Art of Jessica Park) shows us how teachers, peers, places, and
family all played a role in nurturing Ms. Park's ability to draw and paint, and
thereby also drew her to some degree out of the cocoon of autism. Scheckler
("A Storm of Exceptions: On Being a 21st Century Artist-Teacher") traces
the author's ramshackle trajectory toward life as maker and teacher of art,
incorporating tears in a pizza shop, setbacks on a ski mountain, and sideways
glances at Michelangelo, Lewitt, and Basquiat.

Two authors seek to appraise the feelings and perceptions of students
in their university classrooms. Jacques ("Gold and the Night Watchman's
Daughter") ruminates on a single episode of reading Whitman during a class.
The poet asserts, in Jacques' words, "happiness is not tied to wealth, but to
other human beings." Do the students get that message? He unearths some
shards of evidence that they do. Zoltanski's quest to gauge the emotional
state of undergraduates is an empirical one ("Undergraduate Happiness:
Some Preliminary Field Notes from the Classroom"). She created a course
on the sociology of happiness, and shares what she is learning from and about
students.

Two of our authors, Fink ("Reconstructing the University Classroom as
if it were a Preschool") and Crosby ("Reflections on the Craft of Teaching"),
take a crack at describing their own teaching methods. Fink rejects the
sedentary role of the student, to which he was subjected as an undergraduate,
and proposes that college students deserve opportunities for active learning
akin to what is available in high-quality early childhood settings. Crosby
affirms the value of a good lecture, one that has been properly thought out and
prepared. One important step, he advises, is for the aspiring lecturer to think
carefully about the distinction between teaching and entertainment. Another
is to eat a hearty breakfast.

We recommend taking this issue of The Mind's Eye along with breakfast.
Whatever time of day you get to it, we look forward to hearing your comments.

Dale Borman Fink, Ph.D.
Guest Editor

The Mind's Eye 5

Reconstructing the
University Classroom as if It
Were a Preschool

BY DALE BORMAN FINK

When I went to college, the professors "taught" and the students
took notes. Exams and papers were the sole mechanisms by
which faculty evaluated our learning. Audio-visuals (at least in
the humanities, education, and social science courses I took) were nearly non-
existent. There was never any kind of work with peers — except in one famous
Social Relations class that had peer interaction as its sole curriculum. I never
took a class in which a student made a presentation or displayed a poster. This
was at Harvard, and there were among my professors some gifted and inspir-
ing lecturers. So this method of instruction worked well for me — for three or
four semesters.

By the time I was a junior, I felt alienated by the omnipresent lecture hall.
Although I loved Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, I no longer could sit pas-
sively and listen — even to a well-known scholar — discourse twice a week on
these great authors whose novels were the subject of one course I took. The
"tutorials" and seminars were more palatable because they were discussions
rather than lectures, and were intensively up-close-and-personal. But there
were no instructional methods beyond the basics: (a) texts, lots of texts; (b)
discussing texts; (c) writing about texts.

6 The Mind's Eye

Dale Borman Fink

During my final year in college, I began working with preschool-aged
children at KLH Child Development Center in Cambridge, MA, one of the
first employer-sponsored childcare centers in the country. The Center was
founded and staffed by visionary educators and leaders, and I got to see how
young children assimilated and mastered language, social skills, science, lit-
eracy, and math concepts in a supportive environment, in which adults facili-
tated their learning but did not force them to run a preconceived curricular
gauntlet. I saw that children learned through their senses, through engage-
ment with peers, and through interaction with all aspects of the indoor and
outdoor environment. I saw that when adults didn't get in their way or overly
intrude on how they spent their time, these young learners immersed them-
selves in all kinds of investigations, and turned to adults for information, for
social problem solving, and for nurturing. I became vaguely and bewilder-
ingly aware that the social and intellectual discourse surrounding me at the
childcare center had a deeper, richer, and more authentic quality than what I
experienced at Harvard.

A few years later, I obtained a Master's in early childhood education, and
came to realize that the approach to learning I witnessed at KLH (and by then,
in some other places, too) was not the whimsical product of the particular
personalities there, but was consistent with a multi-generational tradition of
American "nursery education," and supported by theorists like Dewey, Piaget,
and Montessori. According to this tradition and these theorists, students do
not assimilate or absorb knowledge by having it handed over or explained by
someone who knows more, but rather, (to use one of Piaget 's key words) they
construct knowledge. They do this through hands-on engagement, and by
developing insights — sometimes including inaccurate ones, which they will
use their later experiences and observations to correct.

I looked back on my Ivy League education and found myself perplexed.
Given this well-documented understanding of how human learning takes
place, why did my professors restrict themselves to such a limited repertoire
of instructional modalities? In calling it "higher education," did our society
mean to untether it from the human imperatives that affect everyone else?
Did someone believe that students at age 18 (or for that matter, 48) no longer
benefited from peer interaction, multi-sensory input, carrying out indepen-
dent investigations, or having a chance to construct — and then later correct —
their own understandings?

By the time I became a faculty member in higher education, a few de-
cades had passed. I wasn't sure what teaching methods other faculty mem-
bers used anymore. But I wanted to bring to my students richer and deeper

The Mind's Eye 7

Dale Borman Fink

opportunities to think and learn than were given to me as an undergraduate.
I wanted to teach college like an early childhood educator.

You are entering a learning zone: no teacher required

A high-quality early childhood setting is thoughtfully designed to en-
courage students to work independently; arriving students do not wait for
a teacher to come to the front of the room and signal that it's time to begin
learning. Quite the opposite: the children presume they should get busy on
their own, unless and until the teacher signals them to put away what they
are working on and, for example, assemble for a "morning meeting." Arriv-
ing students typically hang up their coats, transfer a card with their name on
it to a display board that indicates they are present, perhaps (if this is a public
school) make a notation on a list as to whether they brought lunch or will need a
cafeteria lunch, greet their friends, and (if they can read) find a morning assign-
ment handwritten on a flipchart or a whiteboard. If the classroom features living
animals, the morning assignment could be to observe the animal in its habitat and
record observations in a science journal. In preschool or kindergarten, time may
be available to build with blocks, put on a smock and paint at the easel, engage in
the dramatic play area, take out a puzzle, look at books, or draw independently.

Through this approach, learners do not acquire a view of the teacher as
the sole, or even primary, provider of information and instruction. Rather,
they know that a teacher can fulfill a variety of helpful roles: assist you in
finding a book in the library corner, tie on a smock, or record words that you
dictate on your painting or drawing. Not being at the front of the classroom
or at the center of the learning process frees the teacher to circulate among the
students, building relationships by engaging in personal conversations and
carrying out informal assessment. The teacher, thus freed, can scaffold the
play or efforts of individual students, at whatever level of support each one
needs. ("Scaffolding" was a term favored by the Soviet scholar Lev Vygotsky,
whose work I did not encounter during my studies in early childhood educa-
tion. His work was contemporaneous with the early work of Piaget, but was
unknown by educators in our country until the 1980s.)

Sign in, begin learning

Students in my university classes know to sign in on an attendance sheet,
and then find a card (a folded 3x5 colored index card) with her or his name
on it. After that, she or he looks for a handout or something posted on the
whiteboard, detailing an in-class assignment. It could be a web search with
an expectation of reporting later to classmates. There could be time allotted

8 The Mind's Eye

Dale Borman Fink

for reading an article, with each student or each set of partners summarizing a
portion of the article. It could be taking a practice test, independently or with
a partner, to review something we studied recently.

While class members work semi-independently, I scaffold individual stu-
dents' learning and build relationships with them. I monitor activities, consult
with small groups or partners, and feed them ideas if they are stuck. I infor-
mally assess how well they have grasped concepts recently covered. This also
is a time to trouble-shoot issues concerning recent assignments or answer
questions about grades. Students can seek to speak to me privately during this
time period, or I can initiate a private conversation as needed.

Hold the syllabus; start the engagement

Most students arrive at the first meeting of a new course with the expec-
tation that they can be passive and sedentary. There haven't been any reading
assignments yet, so how could they be expected to participate actively? Expe-
rience also has taught them that the first class will be "organizational," rather
than content-focused. I design the first class meeting to deliberately challenge
these expectations. I do not even introduce myself, let alone discuss the syl-
labus. As soon as they set foot inside the classroom door, I involve them in a
content-focused activity that requires interaction with peers.

My Children's Literature students sometimes arrive on the first day of
class to find the chairs arranged in clusters of four. A copy of Goodnight Moon
by Margaret Wise Brown is available for each group, along with a handout
defining roles they should choose (facilitator, reader, reporter), and a list of
guiding questions to consider as they read and analyze the text and illustra-
tions. In another class, students are asked to find a partner and work on a
"quiz" together. The topics on the quiz foreshadow what we will study in the
months to come. In a graduate special education course on Assessment, I sep-
arate the students into two groups, one to craft a "strength-based assessment"
of Helen Keller, and the other to draft a "deficit-based assessment." They then
watch a few scenes from the 1960s film, The Miracle Worker, in which young
Helen meets her teacher, the legendary Annie Sullivan, for the first time. The
assignment draws on concepts to which the students have not yet been intro-
duced; in preschool, we call that "discovery learning."

I circulate among the students once they are occupied with the assigned
tasks, and welcome them individually in a way I could not if I were to lead the
class from a lectern. Then I exit the classroom for a few minutes. I want them
to see that — so long as I have properly prepared the learning environment —
their learning does not require my presence.

The Mind's Eye 9

Dale Borman Fink

Uncovering, discovering, and constructing knowledge: Dale Finkwatches as two of his
students, with magnifying glass and bug catcher in hand, search for living organisms
to show their classmates.

Engage bodies, emotions, and aesthetic sensibilities — not just minds

In early childhood education, we call it "teaching the whole child." We
do not confine our role to supporting children's "minds" (i.e., cognitive or in-
tellectual growth). Preschoolers need support in the areas of physical/motor,
social/cultural, emotional, and aesthetic development. I have not found any
reason to approach learners at other stages of life differently. Some university
students will deepen their engagement with a text if I give out markers, pen-
cils, and paper, and ask them to respond through visual or artistic representa-
tion. Some resonate to musical thinking. When one of my students developed
a demonstration lesson for third graders on the water cycle, I challenged her
to create a rap using the words, "accumulation, precipitation, condensation,
and evaporation." After they studied how an author of a contemporary chil-
dren's book reinterpreted a Native American fable, I asked students what they
knew about reinterpretation in other creative arts forms. One student eagerly
introduced classmates to Tori Amos's version of the song, "Smells like Teen
Spirit." We listened in class to Nirvana's original recording and then to the reinter-
pretation, and searched together for themes or concepts that might be applied to
the act of reinterpreting across the boundaries of literature and music.

10 The Mind's Eye

Dale Borman Fink

I look for texts that will touch deep places of emotion in students. A
favored fictional text related to education is Crow Boy, a 1955 picture book
by Taro Yashima, about a poor peasant boy in rural Japan who is rejected and
scorned by his classmates.

Sometimes there is no need for a text. Can you and your partner set up
these dominoes in the shape of a "Y" and make them fall? What did you need
to "know" in order to complete that task? Of what physics properties did you
have to take account? What do you think a younger child would get from
doing this activity? 1

Take some play dough and some cookie cutters and other implements,
and begin playing. Feel free to talk and work together with your friends at
the same table. After a while, put away the play dough and jot down some
notes. What kinds of learning and development do you think go on at a table
like this, when three-and four-year- olds are playing with play dough? What
do you think a teacher should be doing (and not doing) to support learning
during this activity?

Most classroom activities allow students to get out of their seats and move
about (e.g., small groups can work in the corridor if they prefer). The proportion
of time students spend in my classes when they have to sit in one place is relative-
ly small. In addition, they know that, at any time, they may move, change seats,
stand, stretch, or take a break from class without asking for permission. That's one
of the ground rules I announce at the first meeting of every course.

After a literature circle, some drawing, playing with materials, reading an
article, or a web-based activity, we reconvene as a group and share what we've
learned. When I am able to come across as a facilitator rather than as the main
provider of information, I then have moved to the role I want to occupy, and
have allowed students to take more responsibility for constructing their own
understandings.

Build social support, scaffold new connections

When a preschooler arrives for her first day, what signals her that some-
one is looking forward to her arrival? She finds a cubby labeled with her
name. I have no cubbies, but I tell students that — like at a wedding or a bar
mitzvah — they each have to find their name on a card. They see that I made at
least a small effort to welcome them, and I believe that searching on a table for
their name preprinted in a large font and taped onto a colored card gives them
something to focus on, instead of being nervous about a new class.

1 I adapted this activity from Ozaki, Yamamoto, and Kamii (2008). What do children learn by
trying to produce the domino effect? Young Children 63, 5, pp. 58-64.

The Mind's Eye 1 1

Dale Borman Fink

In addition to helping me learn their names, the cards serve other pur-
poses unknown to the students. I color-code the cards so that long before I
have learned names, I know by the color whether I am calling on a first-year
student or a senior. When I want them to find a partner or work in a small
group, I don't need to say, "Please choose someone who is not your roommate
or best friend." I simply instruct them to find a partner whose name card has
a color different from their own, or form a group that includes one of each
color. This assures they'll be with students of diverse graduating classes. Con-
versely, there are times when I want the first-years to convene in a discussion
group together, and all the seniors, too. The color-coding easily allows me to
do that, as well.

Later in the semester, when I know the students, I sometimes create
groups of my own choosing by placing selected name cards on chairs that
are set up before students arrive. At other times, students have free choice
to form their own groups — but after a couple of months, they draw from a
larger circle of acquaintances than would have been possible at the start of the
semester. My goal in small group work, aside from taking myself out of the
center of the learning process, is both to build on the natural supports that
some class members are eager to provide to one another, and also to challenge
learners to form new connections. The methods I use enable me to subtly
encourage connections that cross generation, gender, ethnicity, and cultural
backgrounds, as well as anticipated year of graduation.

Have them write papers for someone else — not for professors!

College students — and graduate students even more so — like to impress
faculty with their mastery of conceptual language and their use of arcane,
field-specific vocabulary. It is not the students' fault; years of training and ex-
perience seem to have convinced many of them that filling their papers with
euphonious, polysyllabic phraseology is a surefire route toward a high mark.
I used to provide detailed feedback, requesting that students be more consis-
tent in illustrating concepts with clear examples, and replace jargon whenever
possible with more widely recognized words. But eventually, I figured out a
better strategy: stop writing papers for me. Write the paper for a different
audience.

Students learning to be early childhood educators have to write a letter to
a disgruntled parent. "Why is my daughter playing with marbles and ramps
when I come to pick her up?" the parent wants to know. "Is the teacher too
tired at the end of the day to work with her on her letters, or read her a sto-
rybook?"

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Dale Borman Fink

Students becoming elementary teachers read The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time (Haddon, 2005) and then have to pretend the narra-
tor, Christopher, was a student in their classroom this year. (He is 17 in the
book, and has many characteristics that appear to place him on the autism/
Asperger's spectrum. They imagine what he would have been like as a fourth
grader.) The assignment is to write a letter to the fifth grade teacher who will
have Christopher next fall. That colleague wants to know, "warts and all," what
it will be like to have this boy in her classroom. The teacher works just down
the hall from you, and she's counting on your insights and recommendations
for how to get off on the right foot.

Students who study to be special educators read a published case study
that details problems of professional practice in an actual school district in
West Virginia. The good news, delivered in the form of an assignment, is: You
just got a new job! The bad news? You're the new special education director in
Rainelle County, West Virginia! The superintendent who hired you requests
that you write a letter to those you will be supervising, identifying the key
issues unearthed in the case study, and suggesting ways the district can address
these challenges. My hope is that, in constructing this letter, my students will leave
me out of their thoughts and focus on how to make the right impression on those
reading this letter. (This tactic succeeds with many students, but not all.)

When we don't know the answers, our students can surprise us

One of my early childhood mentors at the University of Illinois, Lilian
Katz, believed it was disrespectful to ask a child a question whose answer you
already knew. If you did, you were just "testing" them, and not having an hon-
est conversation. I do give exams where there are correct answers. However, I
try to allocate as many assignments and as much class time as possible to pro-
mote authentic exploration, analysis, or discussion in which there are no pre-
conceived or correct answers. Students gain confidence in their own thinking
when they participate in inquiry and have some autonomy over the subjects
of their inquiries; that is what I learned as an early childhood educator.

Go to the website that displays special education data for every school
district in our state, I tell my students. Choose a town or city anywhere in
Massachusetts. (They choose towns where they have lived or to which they
have some connection or interest, which drives up their interest in the task.)
Write the names of the town or city you've chosen on the whiteboard. Record
the percentage of students in the selected district who receive special educa-
tion supports and the breakdown into categories (i.e., what percentage have
been labeled with "learning disabilities," what percent "autism," etc.) From

The Mind's Eye 13

Dale Borman Fink

another table, record what percent are fully included in classes with their typi-
cal peers, compared to the percentage who spend their days in segregated set-
tings. I can use my knowledge of general trends to anticipate certain results
and patterns, and to ask probing questions to help them put the numbers they
find in context. However, there is tremendous variation across communities,
and I cannot account for all that they uncover. I become a co-investigator with
them in interpreting the data.

When I assign my Children's Literature students to analyze the use of
colors (and black and white) by illustrator Clement Hurd in Margaret Wise
Browns The Runaway Bunny, or to interpret the references to watches, clocks,
and time in Brian Selznicks The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it is because puz-
zlements have occurred in my own reading of the work. I am not guiding
students toward somehow equaling my own level of erudition on the subject
matter! I often feel anything but erudite, and I honestly hope at least one or
two of them will guide me to a deeper understanding of the work. Some
students, even if they never expand my own understanding, take extra time
to reflect, when they realize that their contributions are not being matched
against predetermined "right answers."

When students surpass the professors — how do we assess them?

The deans office at my university has worked for several years to identify
and then measure "outcomes" in various areas of the higher education curric-
ulum. Within the creative arts, for instance, we have devised assignments to
assess students' ability to find and then analyze and interpret motifs, whether
in musical passages, poetry, painting, film, or literature.

We are to use the results of a single assignment to classify students as "ex-
emplary," "proficient," "developing," or "not acceptable" on this learning out-
come. To earn the top score (as defined in a rubric), a student has to find all
of the motifs in the work, and then describe and thoughtfully analyze them.
Clearly, this rubric presumes that professors must already have found each
and every motif there is to find in the works students are asked to examine.

I thought more about this rubric and these assumptions when one of
my students was giving a class presentation on the text and illustrations of
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. She did not comment on the
resonance of the words that Max, the young protagonist, used when sending
the Wild Things to bed without their supper. She failed to notice that he used
the same words on the Wild Things that Max's mother used toward him. In
other words, my student missed at least one very salient motif. However, she
identified a pattern and variation that I had not discerned in my dozens of

14 The Mind's Eye

Dale Borman Fink

previous readings of this celebrated work. She noticed that as Max begins to
encounter the Wild Things, they have borders around them. But as the reader
turns the pages and follows Max deeper into his fantasy, the border extends
closer to the edges of the pages and finally, during a Wild Rumpus, the Wild
Things break the boundaries of the page borders. There are no more borders,
no more boundaries at all; Sendaks painted forest and characters cover every
square centimeter of the paper and leave no room for white space, borders, or
words. My student explained that, to her, this breaking of the borders seemed
to parallel and represent the unbounded nature of Max's imagination, as he
went deeper on his inward journey.

Is it important that we be able to classify each student on a scale from
"not acceptable" to "exemplary"? If it be important, then where on this scale
do we place a student like this, whose depth of insight outpaces her professor
in some ways, even while lagging behind him in others?

Jean Piaget, the Swiss biologist who became one of the 20th century's
leading child development theorists, divided education into two types — pas-
sive and active. To choose between these two, he explained, we must clarify
our goal. "Must we shape children and individuals who are simply capable
of learning what is already known? To repeat what has been acquired by the
preceding generations? Or is it about shaping innovative, creative minds?" 2

I think Piaget would have recognized in my student's discourse on Sendak
the mark of an innovative, creative mind, born of being an active, rather than
a passive, learner. The increasing focus on educational outcomes embodied in
rubrics is not designed to promote learning, but to facilitate measurement and
comparison across disciplines and institutions. It has the potential to devalue
the kind of creative engagement with subject matter this student demonstrat-
ed, and take us backward to the kinds of sedentary educational environments
that were in vogue when I was an undergraduate. Instead of retreating, why
not move forward to envision how the learning spaces and pedagogy of a uni-
versity can excite the imagination and support the quest for knowledge? If we
commit ourselves to that project, I am confident that we university professors
can support learning and thinking as well as our colleagues in high-quality
early childhood settings across the country and the world.

2 From the opening minutes of the film, "Piaget's Developmental Theory: An Overview" (1989,
Films Media Group). The English translations are my own, not those given in the subtitles.

The Mind's Eye 15

Architecture and the Art of
Discovery

BY GIDEON FINK SHAPIRO

Architecture gets in trouble when it tries directly to instruct. Didactic
architecture tends to come off as heavy-handed or contrived. But
architecture at its best is an art of assisting discovery, to recall Mark
Van Doren's formulation of teaching. Beyond accommodating a given set
of practical functions, architecture may reveal a web of social, physical, and
environmental relationships. Good architecture allows its users to discover
something about its milieu according to the interests and imagination with
which they engage it. Like unforgettable teachers, certain buildings and
landscapes can move us to stretch to apprehend things that we didn't realize
even existed, but which, once discovered, we cannot live without. Or, like the
world of chemistry that I discovered in high school with the help of a great
teacher, some architecture fades from memory in its particulars, but leaves
intact the scorching thrill of experiencing it.

16 The Mind's Eye

Gideon Fink Shapiro

Made of relatively inert materials, architecture must communicate si-
lently, indirectly, relying on visitors to use their own senses and sensibilities
to take in their surroundings. The lack of a common iconographical language
today makes this challenge all the more interesting. Whereas architects of
past centuries used agreed-upon forms and symbols to broadcast their in-
tentions, no one today is expected to know the semiotic differences between
the ancient Doric and Corinthian orders. But we still want to know where
we are. And discovering where we are, and how we fit in with our environ-
ment — particularly in a world of sometimes disorienting mobility, virtual in-
teractions, and effortless consumption — is something that architecture can
facilitate. It does so by giving shape to the relations and ideals by which we
understand our environment, and mediating those relations. It allows us to
discover a sense of topography encompassing both cultural and ecological
values. 1

We trace our path of discovery through the built environment from in-
fancy. It is through domestic architecture and its thresholds, for example,
that many of us first discover the complex cultural expectations of privacy
and togetherness. The architect Richard Neutra, who authored a physiologi-
cal theory of architecture in the 1950s, insisted that the textures, lighting,
and smells of the home and school environments could profoundly influence
a child's health and relationship to the world. 2 Even for adults, discovery
presupposes not erudition but a kind of naivete. To be prepared to discover
something you must not already have all the answers.

One of my earliest memories of architecture as a trigger for discovery was
an igloo-shaped fort of branches and leaves at the edge of the woods in rural
Pennsylvania. It was built by my friend's older (adolescent) brothers, who in-
vited us for a look. After guiding us through fields and trees, they repaired the
roof by tossing fresh heaps of leaves over the lattice of intersecting branches.
We ducked inside to sit in a circle and talk about serious things amidst the
filtered half-light. For me, this excursion to the fort amounted to the dis-
covery of a locus, a place, a clearing. The fort defined a particular gathering
place in a hitherto alien and limitless countryside. It seemed to cement our
friendship with a pact consisting of the shared experience of inhabiting (and
for them, constructing) a space. And it changed the way I saw the fallen veg-
etal matter of the forest, which came alive as the potential building materials
for future Utopian hideouts. This improvised work of architecture made the
woods seem more beautiful and the friends more special, and thus prompted
me to care more about them both.

The Mind's Eye 17

Gideon Fink Shapiro

The do-it-yourself fort apparently was the motivating principle behind the
urban "adventure playgrounds" that sprung up in London and elsewhere af-
ter the Second World War. Strewn with bricks, timber, tires, and tools — mar-
ginally enhanced debris from bombed-out city lots — adventure playgrounds
were designed to give kids the means to discover and develop their power
to shape their environment. But what about adults? In the early 1960s, the
British architect Cedric Price applied the logic of the adventure playground
to a radical leisure space for adults, never built, called Fun Palace. In col-
laboration with the London theater director Joan Littlewood, Price designed
a multi-story structure brimming with user-friendly architectural machinery
derived from backstage theater apparatus. Visitors, like renegade stage techs,
would have the ability to perpetually modify and experiment with their envi-
ronment. 3 In this equation, discovery in architecture was synonymous with
the freedom to build. There were intriguing social implications as well: would
equal rights to reshape architectural space imply equal rights to reshape society?

On the opposite end of the spectrum lies the un-playful architecture of
monuments, freighted with the ponderous duties of memorialization and sig-
nification. Can such serious architecture really assist discovery? Is there any-
thing left to discover after you've read what you're told to read and admired
what you're told to admire? Yes, there can be. Take, for example, the newly

Cedric Price, Interior perspective of Fun Palace, ca. 1960-1 964. This project, which Price
conceived with theater director Joan Littlewood, was a vision for letting visitors shape
their own environment as a stage for interaction.

Credit: Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

18 The Mind's Eye

Gideon Fink Shapiro

FDR Four Freedom's Park, a newly opened memorial completed four decades after its
design, invites visitors to ascribe their own significance to the landscape.

Credit: Photo by author

opened Four Freedoms Park, situated on a four-acre memorial to Franklin
D. Roosevelt on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City, over-
looking the United Nations. The project makes teaching immanent in the
encounter between architecture, landscape, and visitor. The design — by Louis
I. Kahn in 1973-74, executed posthumously — downplays the semantic direc-
tives in favor of evocative spatial-material experience. Like Stonehenge, it is
abstract and mysteriously silent. The climax of the memorial comes at the end
of an austere garden; an open-air "room" enclosed on three sides by towering
slabs of granite, thirty-six tons each, separated by exactly one inch. The fourth
side is open to the East River, the skyline, and the horizon.

With light trickling through the cracks, this primal gathering space feels
intimate as well as monumental; delicate as well as solid. One perceives up
close the swirling tidal waterways surrounding the metropolis, sometimes
threatening it; but also the accrual of millions of actions that keep the city
alive and somehow make it possible to conceive of peace, as the founders
of the United Nations once did. On a recent visit to Four Freedoms Park, I
wondered how New York's shoreline could be made more resilient in the face
of rising sea levels. I thought about its beginnings and endings. As I remembered

The Mind's Eye 19

Gideon Fink Shapiro

and projected, this space gave me the feeling that the city belonged in the land-
scape, and that I belonged in it. It brought me to a threshold of participation in
the vital, yet fragile, enterprise of urban civilization.

A more quotidian but no less inspired new waterfront space is Brooklyn
Bridge Park, a complex of six former shipping piers and warehouses con-
verted into public parkland by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. Here
you can discover important technical and ecological functions of landscape
while having fun. The stormwater collection system creates a promenade and
irrigates the plants. The rolling contours of the lawn — created with fill from
recent Manhattan subway excavations — serve to block traffic noise from a
nearby expressway. The rough boulders along the water's edge, which help
break the force of tidal surges, contain a kayak launch and beach. You can
run yourself ragged playing soccer, or you can sit on the amphitheater steps
and watch the sun set over the skyline as Brooklyn's diverse population strolls
by. The park accommodates rising sea levels not with a giant barrier, but with
intelligent and delightful landscape infrastructure that allows us to become
intimate with the waterfront. Perhaps playing by the shore will make us pay
more attention to the water— and to the ecosystems and economies that de-
pend on it.

Unfolding views of the interior, terrace, and the landscape from the ramp at Le Corbusier's
Villa Savoye in Poissy, France (1928).

Credit: End User 4 via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

20 The Mind's Eye

Gideon Fink Shapiro

The architect Le Corbusier often is remembered for calling the Villa Sa-
voye (1928) a machine a habiter, or a machine for living. Less well remem-
bered, however, is another phrase that he used to describe the same proj-
ect: machine a emouvoir, or machine to arouse emotion. At least for some
visitors, the square, white house of steel, glass, and stucco at Poissy, France,
engenders an almost spiritual self-reflection and environmental awareness.
Villa Savoye makes its first impression from afar, hovering on slender poles
above a grassy field. To enter it is to embark on an "architectural promenade"
and montage: a continuous winding ramp passes through the various living
areas all the way up to the semi-enclosed roof terrace, providing a sequence
of carefully framed views. Every step reveals new spatial relationships, turn-
ing the elevated square structure into a rigorous dance connecting inside and
outside. You sense the newness of the age of the automobile and film, but
also a yearning for harmony between modern technology, the inner psyche,
and the wider landscape. Had Le Corbusier known about Van Doren's phi-
losophy of teaching, he might have added a third term to his list, machine a
decouvrir — a machine for discovery.

Endnotes

1 I borrow this use of "topography" from David Leatherbarrow, Topographi-
cal Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

2 Richard J. Neutra, Survival through Design. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1954. See especially ch. 21.

3 See Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of
Cedric Price. London: Black Dog, 2007.

The Mind's Eye 21

A World Transformed:
The Art of Jessica Park

BY TONY GENGARELLY

Introduction

With the following excerpt, The Mind's Eye continues its tradition
of publishing the winner of the Faculty Incentive Award for best
lecture. Submissions for this award are judged by a commit-
tee of faculty peers at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Professor Tony
Gengarelly received the 2012 award for the pre-publication manuscript of his
book, A World Transformed: The Art of Jessica Park. This book follows other
scholarly activities Gengarelly has carried out relating to the art of Jessica
Park, an artist with autism who was born in North Adams (where MCLA
is located) in 1958, and continues to live in nearby Williamstown. With his
students, he has mounted several major exhibitions of her work. In 2008, he
published a compilation of her paintings, with commentaries.

The chapters we are publishing here, "Budding Talent," and "First
Blooms," trace the early years of Jessicas pursuit of artistic expression. They
eloquently address the theme of this issue of The Mind's Eye, in which authors
are examining teaching and learning in their innumerable variations.

22 The Mind's Eye

Tony Gengarelly

Access to schooling was one ingredient that nurtured Jessicas artistry —
thanks to the fact that Massachusetts spearheaded the mandate to assure all
children with disabilities an individualized, appropriate education, several
years in advance of the rest of the nation. Once the doors to schooling were
opened, this excerpt shows, it was in part the instructional opportunities that
aided her. But equally important was the influence of peers — not the "peer
group" in a general sense, but two very specific peers, highly motivated twin
girls who liked Jessica, took an interest in her, and nurtured her artwork.

These two chapters also identify the impact of place and space on Jessicas
creative learning process. The subjects of her art in the early years were those
places and spaces — and furnishings and mechanical gadgets and doors, as well
as people, that were a familiar part of her life. Beyond this published excerpt,
the narrative details how Jessica eventually would render striking images of the
Brooklyn Bridge, and the Taj Mahal, among many other well-known structures.
These chapters show us the beginnings in her teens and 20s.

A World Transformed is an art biography that reaches beyond labels and
stereotypes to focus on the artist and her artistry, as well as the person who is
revealed through her art. Replete with full color examples of her work, this por-
trait of the artist features several interpretive illustrations by Danielle Christensen
(MCLA 201 1). Readers who wish to acquire the book from which we excerpt
these chapters are encouraged to contact the author, at a.gengarelly@mcla.edu.

Jessica Park in her bedroom-studio, circa 1 972

The Mind's Eye 23

Tony Gengarelly
Budding Talent

As a result of a Massachusetts law that made public education for stu-
dents with disabilities mandatory (one of the first in the United States), Jes-
sica entered Mount Greylock Regional High School shortly after her 12th
birthday in the fall of 1970. In art class, she met twin sisters about her own
age, Anna and Diana Saldo, who would become lifelong friends. They took
a shine to Jessica, noticed her ability to draw, and appointed themselves her
art teachers. Anna and Diana followed the school's curriculum but they ex-
tended Jessica's art lessons to moments at the Parks' summer home on Block
Island.

There, they coached her in drawing a variety of subjects, including an
arresting portrait of Jessica's father, David. The artist's foot in the foreground
implies that she was sitting on the bed to render this drawing. Jessica chose
to include her foot in the picture because she evidently wanted to represent
more of the scene than her seated father. One might call this an artist's in-
spiration or a literal inclusion typical of a person with autism.

Sketch of David Park, 1973

24 The Mind's Eye

Tony Gengarelly

Jessica's line drawing of her father, with its delicate crosshatching, subtle
tonal gradations and accomplished proportion, was matched that summer
with another portrait of one of the twins. These relatively sophisticated draw-
ings were accomplished in 1973, only one year after Jessica, with crayons and
stick figures, created The Book about the Songs. Compared with those el-
ementary drawings, the two portraits revealed a prodigious talent beneath
Jessica's visual shorthand. This talent continued to surface during her sev-
eral years in high school, and is confirmed by a number of other pictures, as
well as her sketchbook from that time.

Over the years, Jessica's ability to understand and apply color also ex-
panded. At the age of 14 she learned how to use acrylic paints from another
good friend of the family, Valerie Pinsky. Valerie, then in her first year of
college, was Jessica's camp counselor. She also visited the Park family on
Block Island, and not only inspired The Book about the Songs, but introduced
the use of acrylic paints. Jessica, thrilled with these new color applications,
created a series of paintings on discarded wooden shingles. These "shingle
paintings" were her first adventure with the medium she has used for her
entire painting career.

Jessica graduated from Mount Greylock at the age of 21. Although she
had made great strides in overcoming many of her developmental limitations
and could read and write, her future was uncertain. She continued to make
art, which was becoming a daily routine, and to accompany her mother when she
spoke to groups and organizations about the subject of autism. Clara was deter-
mined to share her painfully gained insights with a larger audience, and Jessica
gladly served as the living example of her mother's hard-earned wisdom.

On one such occasion, when Clara had brought some of Jessica's pictures
as an illustration of her daughter's artistry, someone spied a painting and
offered to buy it for a small sum of money. Somewhat surprised, Clara, with
Jessica's approval, agreed to part with the picture, and an art career was born.

With encouragement from those who admired and purchased her
work — family and friends, as well as people who cherished her art as an ex-
ample of what someone with a developmental disability could do — Jessica
began to create more and more paintings.

Now she combined her high school art training with a growing enthu-
siasm for mechanical gadgets to create two-dimensional pictures of space
heaters, automobile dashboards, electric -blanket controls and radio dials.
Jessica still is fascinated by mechanical objects. They appear in her more
elaborate paintings of other subjects, such as clock towers.

She embellished her drawings of dials and heaters with an opulent array

The Mind's Eye 25

Tony Gengarelly

of hues that pleased her. The colors also helped highlight important details
and organize her pictures with their systematic application. The Bathroom
Heater at Franziska's House from 1981 shows one of Jessica's preferred sub-
jects arranged as a grid of 792 brightly colored rectangles. She accomplished
the pattern with the application of one color at a time, a method that she still
uses today. According to Clara's account in The Siege (1967), Jessica was able
to see the entire grid in her mind's eye as she carefully laid in the colors.

This extraordinary application was most likely derived from an ear-
lier experience of creating systems. From the ages of 12 to 16, Jessica used
numbers and symbols to represent different emotional responses to sound
and weather. Her numerical calculations soothed the intensity of an emo-
tional response; the symbols recorded her levels of pleasure and displeasure.
When under duress, Jessica calmed herself by doing elaborate calculations
that ultimately balanced the numbers 3 (a "bad" number) and 7 (a "good"
number). She made charts and diagrams for her symbolic language. Bright
sun represented a perfect day or an exceptional sound, but clouds recorded a
diminished excitement due to weather or other, in Jessica's words, "discour-
agements." She included doors, scaled 1:4, to mute the intensity of feeling

All
Different
Kinds of
Days

"Day
High"
(a very,
very good
day) Juice
Level 7

DAY NOTHING
DAY HIGH NOTHING
DAY HIGH
DAY HIGH PLACE
DAY PLACE
DAY CENTER
DAY NO
DAY BASE
DAY DARK
DAY CLOUD
DAY ALL

DAY HIGH CLOUD

DAY DARK CLOUD

DAY BASE DARK

DAY HIGH DARK

DAY HIGH DARK CLOUD

DAY NOTHING SQUARE j

NO DAY THING

DAY BAD

DAY BUMP

DAY PLACE MUSIC

DAY HIGH PLACE MUSIC

DAY DARK MUSIC

DAY SUNLIGHT

DAY SUN

DAYUGHT

DAY HIGH SUN

DAY HIGH CLOUD SUN

DAY HIGH MOON CLOUD

37003
35703

IMAGINARY DAYS

33/K

s w

3V«

73fc9
597529
72H301

Illustration by Danielle Christensen (MCLA 201 1 ); Jessica's chart found in
David Parkand Philip Youderian, "Light and Number: Ordering Principles
in the World of an Autistic Child," Journal of Autism and Childhood
Schizophrenia 4.4 (1 974).

26 The Minds Eye

Tony Gengarelly

when it was, in her words, "too good." She even used a drinking glass with
numbered lines on it to record her reaction to the day. For instance, line
seven on the glass indicated "Day High" or a very, very good day. These
early efforts with ordering principles were echoed in the colored grids on Jes-
sica's heaters, dials, and blanket controls. The color grid eventually became
a compositional anchor for her art.

First Blooms

Jessica also explored different subjects during this time, as she continued
to work on the elements of picture making. Fascinated by railroad crossings,
she created an abstract rendition for her brother in 1980. The tracks are ver-
tical against a flat background. At this point, Jessica had yet to learn how to
represent a scene realistically. Her perspective is askew, the tracks misplaced
and the background a minimalist band of colors. Jessica set about "improv-
ing" the picture, largely by her own efforts. The Railroad Crossing in Hoosick
Falls #2, Nighttime of 1988 reveals an improved perspective and introduces
a largely self-taught artist who makes selective choices while incorporating
unusual colors and imaginative skies into a naturalistic setting. The purple

The Railroad Crossing in Hoosick Falls #2, Nighttime, 1 988

The Mind's Eye 27

Tony Gengarelly

hill and stylized trees were not in the original scene. Jessica substituted them
for houses and other buildings. The octagonal structure; however, caught
her eye and is rendered in exotic hues. The starlit sky features a crystal-like di-
amond that represents the planet Venus. This 1988 rendition displays the marks
of the budding artist, especially her imaginative inclusions, as well as a growing
sense of perspective depth and dimensionality.

In the summer of 1983, the Parks visited Jessica's Aunt Adrienne in
Brooklyn, New York. Dinners were invariably late at Aunt Adrienne's house,
so Clara made sure Jessica had a sketchbook and pencils to occupy her. When
Jessica found a set of glass doors — four panels with filigree patterns — leading
to an outside porch, she knew she had found her subject. Jessica set to work
and accomplished her drawing just before dinner.

Months later, in her Williamstown bedroom-studio, she produced the
first of what was to become a major series of paintings. Jessica's love of rep-
etition, an aspect of her autism, now became the exploration of a theme. Her
inclination to compartmentalize forms and colors fit perfectly into the intricate
pattern of the doors. Jessica's ability to mix and harmonize individual colors al-
lowed her to combine many stained-glass effects with multiple variations.

Her simple grid drawing, with its diagonal floorboards interrupted by
strong vertical lines of the doors and horizontal features of the porch, pro-
vided a frame for the view outside. Here Jessica employed her observation
skills and potent memory to represent variations in weather, time of day and
season, and to explore another theme she was soon to embrace more fully —
the skies beyond.

There is also a mysterious shadow on the far-right door that appears
in the daytime versions. After much coaching, Jessica explained that the
shadow was cast by a refrigerator on the porch. Jessica, especially fond of
shadows, was drawn to details that fascinated her. So she included the re-
frigerator's shadow in these paintings. Like the foot in the drawing of David
Park, did Jessica record the shadow to suit her need as an artist, or because it
was there? Here, autistic literalism, once again, appears to coincide with the
inclination of the painter.

The first 10 paintings of the doors were completed between 1983 and
1993, but Jessica has returned to the series from time to time, using the same
worn drawing as her template. Having already given a set of doors to her
parents and to her older sisters (Katharine and Rachel), in 2006 she did a
15th picture for her brother, Paul.

Jessica's repetition of objects she especially enjoyed suggested the work
of artists such as Claude Monet, who painted the same trees, rivers and grain

28 The Mind's Eye

Tony Gengarelly

stacks under different conditions of light and weather. But Jessica was not inter-
ested in the work of other artists. A visit to an art museum elicited very little re-
sponse to the pictures and more interest in security-system devices on the walls.
Jessica was focused on her inner world and the parts of the outer world that
delighted or frightened her, or inspired her visionary sensibility.

A special note of thanks to Dale Borman Fink, editor of A World Transformed,
and to Leon Peters who prepared this special layout for The Mind's Eye.

© Images are copyrighted by Jessica Park, 2013.

The Mind's Eye 29

A Storm of Exceptions:
On Being a 21st Century
Artist-Teacher

BY GREGORY SCHECKLER

"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness"

— Yousef Karsh

That boulder has something to say

In the middle of my college studies, I studied for a year in Innsbruck,
Austria. Inspiration sparked: European art isn't always well-lit and hush-
hushed in rarefied museums with "hands off" signs. It's on street corners,
inside restaurants. You can't avoid it. This became a reality one day when in
Italy, reading a guidebook while looking for unfinished Michelangelo sculp-
tures, I suddenly realized that the boulder I was leaning on was an unfinished
Michelangelo sculpture. ...

Seeing great artworks in person sang the tone of quality, the timbre of
seeking excellence, the storm of action. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli,
Masaccio — possibly the healthiest education is raw travel. Bring a sketch-
book. Get off the standard curriculum: go sit on a Michelangelo.

Indeed, if your idea of an art class is learning a discrete set of measurable
techniques from an expert artist, you don't need college. You can get good,
step-by-step lessons from free, online videos. College provides good directed
lessons, too, and more; arts-interested peers, studio time, facilities you might
not have access to, interactions with non-arts disciplines, chats with success-
ful artists, and wild art parties.

30 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

All the waiters are actors

Not too long ago a painting student asked me, "How did you become an
artist?"

So, I told her how I used to sell toys. Then I mentioned how I got fired
for stocking beer wrongly at a convenience store. And how I'd also worked as
a camp counselor (how to tie knots), a wiring installer for computer networks
(how to avoid knots), an insurance claims processor (untying knots), and a
state park summer laborer (cleaning latrines).

One year, I cut onions at 5 a.m. for a pizza joint under the tutelage of a
longtime employee. I was too busy crying. She used to say, "Hey cracker, boy
you gotta toughen up!" Between tears and oniony snuffles, I'd joke, "What
kind of cracker? Saltine, Triscuit, or Wheat Thin?" To which my boss would
reply, "Aww honey, you just another crybaby cracker!"

My student wasn't thrilled by these responses, and persisted, "But how
did you become an artist?"

One of my favorite art professors used to be a milkman. He was also, for
a short time, a professional boxer — and also an exhibiting artist, a student,
and eventually, an art professor. If we are to understand that art and life relate
to one another, then all of those activities — having a life — are important parts
of being an artist.

Yet being an artist isn't just a job. For some it's not a profession. Being an
artist is more of a visually-based livingry; sometimes a joy, and often a persis-
tent intrigue. How then can we describe who is an artist?

The definition of artist ought to be more like the law of gravity

Art-making is the defining act of being an artist. Being an artist is a lot
more than making art; and along with the making, one survives and gains
ways to make more good art. Sidelines include the continuity of the art-
making, the desire to improve — even the interpreting and presenting of the
artworks — and if needed the dreaded non-art job to help pay the bills, as well
as all the other trappings of modern life: acquiring food, housing, transpor-
tation, good solid friends and family. But pulling at the center is always the
art-making.

Does one ever become an artist? I'm not sure. A beginning: childhood,
drawing pictures. The scene: a basic American living room. The floor, covered
with drawing paper, crayons, and me and probably my brother and sisters mak-
ing up images, scribbles, wayward games. We drew pictures at so young an age
that I cannot recall a time when we weren't scribbling; was there a moment when

The Mind's Eye 3 1

Gregory Scheckler

we children were not artists but then suddenly became artists? Wasn't the center
always pulling at us? And if making art is the base definition of being an artist
then, by all means, at some point in our lives aren't we all artists?

Just like how you are always in the middle of being an artist, making pic-
tures seems more a natural series of progressions. I like the way photographer
Edward Weston positioned image-making as natural: "Consulting the rules of
composition before taking a photograph is like consulting the laws of gravity
before going for a walk."

I don't think he meant the artist shouldn't consult the laws of gravity;
rather, that if you do, you should gain the deep feeling for composing just as
you need to feel the gravity pulling through your center in order to walk.

Man oh man, look at that fear go

Gravity implies space. Space implies transit and time. Putting gravity space
and time, and transit together means sometimes we fall flat on our faces.

I am not a man of faith. I do not feel I have to "believe" that art is my life's
work, nor do I make choices on the basis of blind adherence to unprovables.
If you're like me, then as an artist you weren't wholly confident when you were
beginning your artworks, but you dove into a life as an artist anyway — you
knew it was possible because other artists had done so, and you could make
some art, so, you dove in. And since the art-making urge is a natural force
that centers like gravity, maybe it isn't entirely a choice, but from darkness an
utterance. How can you not create?

Some people manage to insert gravity into their life's work. My first pro-
fessional art shows were in the late 1980s, while I was a college student. These
were conscious choices. Much earlier I'd been in art shows, contests, and even
sold cartoons of skiing penguins — $1 per cartoon — to my classmates back in
second grade, without much forethought. But the idea of doing this con-
sciously for me was in the late '80s, during that telltale time in one's education
that hits many students when they suddenly realize that college soon will be
over, and they now need a way to survive.

I was full of fear and doubt about this. Today, in 2013, 1 still have doubts
and moments when it seems reasonable to give up. This is not unusual: be-
cause they make more artworks than anyone else, artists probably also en-
counter more art-related fears and doubts than those who do not actively
pursue art-making — and more rejection, more letdowns, and more of the ups
and downs of exhibiting.

I feel almost exactly the same way whenever I ski the steeps. Peering over
the edge of the mountain sometimes I think, "Gee, this is stupid," and "Wow,

32 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

this must be too dangerous to do." Sometimes this is more of a whine: "But I
don't wannnnaaa go there!" Sometimes I choose not to. Sometimes it really
is too dangerous (at least I can take my skis off and walk down the mountain).
Sometimes I ski anyway and find a great patch of powder that wasn't visible
from the fear-inducing precipice. Sometimes none of my skills work together
and I flollop around, and fall flat on my face. All good skiers fall. The more
you practice the less it happens, but it still happens. If you'd like to rubber-
neck at an accident you can see me fall online, in this video (at timestamp 0:52
http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=_PnqFXAmLfk).

Let's just say there's more than one way to get down the mountain, and
they aren't all in a direct line. So you bring your fear along with you and know
that, once in a while, it'll demand some extra attention. One big secret of
adulthood is this: usually nobody else notices any of your inner fears.

Get your 10,000 early if you can

One often hears that it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of solid practice, play,
and attention to become truly good at any skill: a sport, a musical instru-
ment, being a doctor or accountant. So if you start that interest when you're
young, by the time you're in your 20s, you might just be good at the skills.
It's never too late to start, but the kids who started early gained some serious
skills much earlier than adults who started late.

When people become accomplished in the arts we say they're talented.
As in, "Gee, I can only draw stick figures, but you draw so beautifully, you're
so talented!" But behind the mystique of talent are thousands of hours of
practice; not just any practice, but the art practice: the persistent making and
exploration of images with a mind tuned toward the qualities of expression,
provocation, honesty, beauty, illusion-representation-allusion — the stuff of vi-
sual poetry. Michelangelo had an ornery way of saying this:

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,
it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Fortunately, Michelangelo's sour characterization isn't the entire truth of
making art. Artist Sol LeWitt added:

Your work isn't a high stakes, nail-biting professional challenge. It's
a form of play. Lighten up and have fun with it.

In both cases, whether it lights torturous flames or incendiary play, the
image-making remains central. Personally, I think the more playful attitude is
the better.

The Mind's Eye 33

Gregory Scheckler

Your main squeeze

The focus is on the making; the making is sourced by the artistic practice.
Thus my college art syllabi could reduce to "Make art, talk about art, then
make more art."

Obviously, we cannot have practice without theory, action without inter-
pretation, presenting without marketing, and making without a medium —
and therein are many thorny art educational issues. (Which theories? Which
interpretations and from whom? Which media and what techniques do they
require? What kinds of marketing and to which parts of the world? What sub-
ject matter, style, or outlook?) But these puzzles mustn't eclipse the centrality
of the art-making. On this issue, Leonardo da Vinci's words strike a chord
with me: "The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance."

The same is true of teaching. H.L. Mencken, ever the rapier wit, snarked
that "A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas."

Indeed, too much reading of art history or theory will not make an inar-
ticulate painting more subtly crafted — for that, one must paint. Artists aren't
just sports super fans who know every statistic of every game but who can't
throw the ball. Instead, we know a lot of the sport, but we throw. We run. We
paint. We draw. We photograph. We design. We animate. We provoke... and
most often we learn by doing.

As such, being an artist is far more than showing up for an art class and
making a painting. It's much more than being an art major in college. It is in
the making, in the athleticism. It is in the engagement with a long-term, ongoing
practice. It is living the painting, squeezing the colors out of the tubes that are
your deep experience and imagination of the world, poured out to build new im-
agery. In a moment of desperation one of my teachers quipped, "Grab the goddess
of creativity and hug her hard until she turns into more paint."

No one true path, yes superhighway interchange

Do you, the artist, have a purpose? Gawd, I hope not. Nothing could be
narrower than being on just one singular mission, nothing more stultifying
than to have no choice about what you will do; nothing more disappointing
than when that narrow mission just doesn't work out. In contrast to a singular
mission, I bet you have lots of roles throughout any given day, and that, as
you age, your ideas and mind will change, and so will your main activities. If
you're an artist, then you have some choices about when, how, and what kinds
of art you make; your art interests might change from year to year, and you
can choose not to make art, too.

34 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

The wonderful photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen likens the many
choices we artists face to taking busses from the Helsinki Bus Station — imag-
ine each bus line is like a year in your life as an artist; you get on the bus, and
realize another bus line is going the same direction. This means that some
other artist is doing what you're doing. This could be a good coincidence, or
an annoying connection. But your own deep artistic interest is in the differ-
ences between bus lines, in the fact that Bus 71 may share some of its route
with Bus 22, but eventually it goes to a different destination. It branches out.
"It's the separation that makes all the difference..." and there at the separation
is where artistic breakthroughs might happen, where you on your bus start to
find an interesting new vision, a new direction. ("The Helsinki Bus Station
Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography" by Arno Rafael Mink-
kinen, for petapixel.com at www.petapixel.com/2013/03/13/fhe-helsinki-bus-
station-theory-finding-your-own-vision-in-photography/) Indeed, diversity
and plurality and new directions are fundamentally important parts of the
visual arts, not merely doing what everyone else has already done.

When do you get on your own bus? These days I try to start every day by
making a quick drawing or painting. I wake up, fix breakfast, feed the cats,
and make a sketch. No rules, except for how it's good not to check email.
Don't play video games. Don't turn on the news. Don't read a book. Make
the art. For me, art-making right away sets the tone for the day: creativity is
the beginning.

Probably somewhere in that activity is some sort of grand philosophy
"creativity is the beginning." But it seems to me to be more of a common-
sense doing. And there's no pressure to perform, no high-stakes deadlines
with these small, generative sketches.

The intoxications of your teachers

Good art schools provide many good teachers. But how do you teach
the creativity that deals with the visual arts? Examples: my first college art
course in drawing was provided by a senior professor in the art department.
His syllabus went like this: get some paper and pencils, and let's make pictures
together.

No spreadsheets. No rubrics. He was sneaky. He introduced a great
many techniques and traditions with a sly smile and a "Gee, what if you tried
this?" attitude. There was never any indoctrination, there were no high-stakes
exams, and yet there was more learning than in any course I'd ever taken. If
he wanted to teach toned-paper heightened drawing, he didn't assign it; he
just arrived with some toned paper and gave it to students and we drew, and

The Mind's Eye 35

Gregory Scheckler

then he wondered what would happen if we added some light chalk, or white
paint? How would that work? He asked questions, and snuck learning in on
the side.

He piled one giant still life in the center of the classroom: toys, dolls, an-
tique casts, chairs, locks and chains, bicycles, mirrors, old paintings, flickering
lanterns, and live nude models wearing thigh-high leather boots and Venetian
masks, moving or standing or sitting wherever they wanted, sometimes im-
mediately in front of you blocking your view of everything but their, umm,
specialties. The affect intoxicated and mystified, like walking inside Plato's
Cave of the mind.

The silent treatment

My first college art teacher had a colleague who also taught some of the
painting courses, who never spoke. But he smiled or shrugged at your paint-
ings; he painted with you. His approach was unstructured and rigorous all at
once. And realistic, in that when your art is on display in the museum, people
look, shrug, chat with each other maybe a little — but mostly if they like the art
and find some interest in it, they look more and talk less. Nonverbal interac-
tion is to visual art what grammar is to literature.

With this kind of exploratory art-making it's not possible to know ahead
of time what the outcomes are going to be: the painting isn't finished until af-
terward. Artists tend to look forward, act in the present, create. And because
you don't know what the outcomes will be, from this view it doesn't make
sense to plan a course too much, other than to recognize we will make art
together. Not all art professors are like these first two (I'm not) but I've always
kept their open-mindedness and sneakiness in mind.

A visual rigor

A counter-example: a well-known professor's approach was structured.
We drew with conte crayon and line only, creating intense anatomical studies
of the human nude. We did this for two semesters. No erasing, no hesitancy;
all form and roundness and rigorous proportion. For readers who haven't
done much figure drawing, it is a difficult task; more so if you cannot erase,
even more so when every line must flex into the depth of space.

His final exam was to create two life-size drawings of a skeleton, in about
two days' time. Every knurl, every joint, every form positioned and propor-
tioned. Have you ever had an exam that lasted for two days? Have you ever
had an exam where the goal was not to give the right multiple choice answer
or essay response, but to draw a superb, precise picture?

36 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

Drawing on the cave walls

Students spark each other's motivations because students have the best
parties. Ours often went like this: cover all walls with blank paper. Give ev-
eryone crayons. Get buzzed. Draw whatever the eff you want.

We drew leeches sucking the life out of unsuspecting supermodels, we
drew Batman, we drew airplanes and trees and butterflies and unicorns and
a lipstick-smeared clown named Mr. Statue of Liberty. I'm not sure any of it
made any sense. But somehow this inspired us... an almost endless supply of
creative pursuits that may have had nothing or everything to do with enliven-
ing the walls as if we were modern cavemen.

Earning enough rejections to keep the recycling center in business

My first big rejection went like this: sorry kid, you're a wonderful artist
but your art's not good enough yet for graduate school. My professors were as
gentle as possible about this. But it stung: you're not good enough. Sooner or
later every artist faces rejection. Mine seemed to say that the goal of becom-
ing an artist is one big stupid lie. And yes, it's hard psychological work to turn
that first big rejection into an opportunity; to recycle it.

So, I didn't do grad school right away, and instead transferred into a
bigger art program for more experience. Thus from that first big rejection I
gained two more years of undergraduate studio time, in a focused community
of painting students.

Do artists ever get used to rejections? After a while the rejections seem
to become part of the iron wall that is some of the mind of the artist who
insists on continuing to be an artist. They recycle more quickly. It's as if, like
an arcing Richard Serra sculpture, the artist has an oversized rusty metal wall
in mind, immense and immobile, insisting on making art, placed just so at
slightly disorienting angles in order to direct you and the artist ever-onward
to flashes of light and beauty.

Need more opportunities to become an artist? Get more rejections!

Vampires of the arts

Eventually, I built a strong enough portfolio and went to New York City.
This was sort of a disaster. I was a student there for a while, attending a nar-
rowly conceived figurative art academy disguised as a graduate school, and
also was dogged by frequent migraines and fatigue and their attendant hallu-
cinations. New York is such a lively place that I am still not sure if there was a
parade of a thousand bunnies down Broadway led by a troupe of blue- skinned
contortionists.

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Gregory Scheckler

During that time, Jean Michel Basquiat's work was presented as a retro-
spective at the Whitney. What awesome art! It was full of vigor, color, wild
brushstrokes and witticisms, meanderings, cartooning. I loved his show, and
made the mistake of mentioning it during graduate school art critiques.

If you're unfamiliar with the typical art school group critique session,
well, consider yourself lucky. Critiques are by far the worst teaching tech-
nique ever invented. They go like this: you put your carefully-wrought art-
work on display, and then everyone opinionates about it until you barf and
cry. Too often college art critiques are a form of institutionalized bulimia.

The mention of enjoying Basquiat struck horror in more than a few of the
professors, and some became angry, so much so that the critique never dis-
cussed the artworks we had put on the wall (thank goodness!), and devolved
into professors debating each other about their own parasites theories. (H.L.
Mencken was right!)

The problem was this: having struggled for years to bring more and bet-
ter attention to their own figurative artworks, the professors for the most
part hated the anti-establishment artworks of people like Basquiat, who had
gained the money and prestige that the professors had never accomplished. Such
is the life of many traditional realist painters: full of jealousy about all the other
artists who gain fame and fortune while their own terribly difficult realisms do
not.

There's sort of a priestly attitude about making a lot of fine figurative art,
an attitude that too often derides other kinds of art, and which requires its ad-
herents to believe themselves on a holy mission to preserve or renew the best
of old art traditions. It strokes the ego: we are so good at this that we're truly
carrying on Raphael's legacy! (Or Caravaggio, or Bouguereau, or whomever
the figurative painting hero of the day is.) As if they even come close to Ra-
phael's vision....

In other words, there are vampires in the art world who will try to suck
the life out of you, force-feed you their blood, and turn you into a follower and
maker of their art style (not your own art and interests, of course, but theirs).
Such exclusionary, insular tactics and teachings are best avoided. They have
very little to do with what it's like to work as an artist outside of academe.

Many survive quite well without fame, thank you

A good chunk of being an artist is figuring out how to survive. And after
graduate school, having decided not to pursue teaching right away, it was time
for me to just be an artist.

I wasn't ready for this. Following graduate school I was deeply dissatis-

38 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

fied with much of the art I'd made, and I didn't want a job. In fact, I was un-
employed for about a year after graduate school, selling the occasional paint-
ing and using up all of my savings until I was so broke I had to get some sort
of job. The main job that made survival possible was managerial work at a
gallery.

Some of the gallery's artists pulled in tens of thousands of dollars in gross
sales every year — all at a small regional gallery far off the New York / L.A. art
radar. That fact was enlightening in and of itself: there are plenty of artists
who survive — and survive well — but who are never in the famous big city art
publications, reviews, galleries, or museums.

Some of these artists could have survived off of sales from our gallery
alone, but the more popular ones all were in many more than one gallery.
They diversified, they sold well; they earned good livings. Many of them pro-
duced gross sales of as much income as a decent doctor or lawyer.

It's not about you, it's about them

Working in a gallery taught me that selling art isn't about what you, oh
holy artist, love about your artworks. Nor was it about what you, oh great
salesman, think is worthwhile art that you'd love to have in your own personal
collection of awesomeness. It is about what clients need and want — what they
like, and what they find interesting, and whether or not your art matches into
their interests. The job of selling art is to figure out what they need, and then
find ways for what you have to offer to meet their needs.

Also, markets differ. What sells in one market may have no effect in an-
other. So as an artist, you have to match your art to those portions of the art
world that can interact with and support it. Do you make large, Expression-
istic concept paintings with a touch of Pop Surrealism? Great, go for funkier
parts of the New York City gallery scene. Do you make gorgeous, realistic
portrait paintings? Awesome! But get yourself a portrait agent to contact
clients and gain commissions. Are your drawings charming cartoons of skip-
ping bears? That's cool! Sell them to a children's book publisher. You have
to be assertive about this: focus in on the markets that work for your artistry.
The art world is so vast I have no doubt that, no matter what artwork you cre-
ate, there can be a market for your work. But, not every market will support
every artist.

The spectre of job security always whispers sweet nothings

Sometimes it seems like everybody wants tenure. It includes some un-
usually reliable job security. Job security can mean a decent paycheck, which

The Mind's Eye 39

Gregory Scheckler

certainly helps one to weather through the unpredictable nature of art world
fashion trends. But it also can breed something terribly negative for the art-
ist: you can get too comfortable, you can lose your edge, you can cease being
desperate enough to do that extra bit of work your painting needs in order to
be of the highest quality. And all that teaching and committee work is time
you're not in the studio and not marketing your own work: which is great if
you love teaching and are good at it, but a demon-in-waiting if you're only a
teacher in order to be an artist, or if you just get tired of teaching.

Meanwhile, the real function of tenure actually isn't job security. Tenure
means that your boss can't force you to teach creationism during your con-
temporary evolution course. Tenure is fundamentally about academic free-
dom and the responsibility to provide truthful teaching despite the political
whims of leaders who, more often than not, know nothing of your field of
expertise. The protection of tenure is against ignorant bullies who get roles of
power. But I have yet to meet an administrator who is a bully — so the protec-
tion seems based largely in fear, rather than reality.

So the challenge, then, of having earned and acquired tenure, is this: how
to refuse complacency; how to maintain your creative edge and keep explor-
ing, keep building interesting artworks. And it just so happens that this chal-
lenge is not a result of tenure, and is the same challenge faced by many artists.

Art, it ain't rocket science, and other stereotypes of art teaching

So, you're going to make some art. If you're a student, your parents are
probably worried you'll starve and never have a reliable job (I've never had
one either). If you're an art student's peers, you may be thinking art is easy
and that you should go into art because, well, you're not quite smart enough
for real fields like science, math, or — well, you know, fields where they have all
those exams and stuff.

But the art will be an object, and therefore is physical, observable, expe-
riential and highly objective. We can look at it, discuss it, and make more.
The mere mention that art might contain and provoke truths and includes
knowledge and aptitudes and verifiable experiences that we can share flies in
the face of postmodern/poststructuralist beliefs about art's veracity, and also
denies the stereotype that art is subjective, gooey meandering. Sure, art ain't
rocket science. We don't do double-blind or even single-blind studies, not
really. Yet for all that, there are many reliable aspects of the arts that can be
taught, even creativity itself.

I'm reminded of a BBC comedy — I think it was an episode of Mr. Bean —
that involved an adult who'd returned to school for a few evening classes, who

40 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

found himself locked into an art classroom with a strange teacher: a fetching
lass wearing a beret, speaking in a French accent, who pressed her hand on
each student's forehead and yelped, "Inspire!" Then, students drew from a still
life, as if magically inspired by the teacher's heartfelt emotional prompts. As
they drew, she would stop them, change something in the drawing, press her
hand on their foreheads again and yelp, "Inspire!" And then they switched
subject matter and were presented with a nude, more "Inspire!" head-slap-
ping, and much confusion all around as the students gasped agog with stupor
and drooling, embarrassed. It was good comedy, reflecting the inarticulate,
emotional artist-teacher who attempted to magically make and inspire new
art out of thin air.

And this is not how I teach. First of all, I don't have a beret (only be-
cause I'm too cheap to buy one!). Secondly, there are skills and concepts that
students can learn that are concrete, learnable, and inspiring, and that don't
require magical thinking: tone, value, color, form, representation, metaphor,
composition, art histories, creative process and problem -solving, art materials
and the subtleties of their use, and much more. But at some point we do just
sort of make stuff out of raw inspiration and magic.

What an art professor really does

As an art professor, I deal in imagination and art-making. Despite all of
the fancy jargon you can read in college catalogs about what's in an art class,
for me every class basically goes like this: make pictures; look at, read about,
and talk about pictures made by each other and by other people; and make
more pictures.

Hopefully within that small cycle we attempt to make not just any image,
but truly excellent pictures. As such, good craft matters. Technique matters.
Knowledge matters. Ultimately, making pictures is about creating meanings
and living worthwhile lives. Sometimes.

But we artist-teachers, still we go all dada

Every semester there's always at least one student who drives me nuts.
About this student the best attitude might be the disarming zen koan.

I should know, I was that student sometimes; at times bullheaded, sloppy,
inattentive, so enamored of my own art hat I refused to learn the teacher's les-
sons. Now that I teach, I see this kind of thing all the time. It goes like this:

Student: Sorry I'm late. I'm worried being late will affect my grade,
but you see I just can't eat dinner fast enough to get here on time.
Teacher: You can be early, on time or late, but class starts at 5. If you

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Gregory Scheckler

arrive late it's your responsibility to make up whatever you missed.
Student: Oh cool, so I can be late.
Teacher: (drops head into hands)

Student: How come you gave me a bad midterm grade?
Teacher: You didn't turn in over half of the assignments. I can't
provide a grade for work you didn't do.
Student: But I attended every class.

Teacher: Yes, but did you turn in all of the assignments, half the
assignments, or less than half?

Student: Less than half, I think. But I deserve a passing grade.
Teacher: Um, no.

If it's any consolation to the students who might be reading this, there's
also every semester at least one teacher who will drive the student nuts. I
should know; sometimes I am that teacher. Oh, and there's also always at
least one administrator who drives the teachers batty. What comes around
goes around, or something, but apparently with increasingly greater pay rates
along the way.

Sometimes I think it's best just to respond with non sequitur. Cut to the
nonsense since that's where we're going anyway.

Student: Sorry I'm late. I'm worried being late will affect my grade,
but you see I just can't eat dinner fast enough to get here on time.
Teacher: Have you ever worn two sets of mismatched socks on the
same day, two sets?
Student: Wait, huh? What?

Teacher: The route to New Jersey includes lemons and shoe horn.

Student: Um, errrrm, doh.

Teacher: A goat flies over the bacon! Snnnuurrrg!

The line cook at the local diner is a professional

Most of my students and I started out as lovers of art, very interested
and engaged with images and metaphors and meanings. The definition of
amateur is "one who loves," from the Latin amator, meaning lover. Doing art
because you love it means you are an amateur.

Doing art in order to earn money is being a professional. Many profes-
sionals love their craft, too; but they do the craft to earn a living. Should it
be the effect of the college degree to push students away from being amateurs
and toward being professionals? Let's not be too quick to dismiss the impor-

42 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

tance of the amateurs attitudes, nor too quick to overestimate the quality of
the professional.

The line cook at the local diner is a professional cook. We don't know
anything about the quality of the cooking merely on the knowledge that the
cook is getting paid. On professionalism, think about this: is every lawyer a
great lawyer? Is every doctor superb? Of course not. We all think we're better
than average, but that isn't statistically possible. Someone's not average. And
someone who gets paid to do a job maybe below average, and yet still be paid.
Not every line cook is a great chef.

And some amateurs may be far above average in terms of their skills,
knowledge of their craft, the art world, and art history. Some amateurs might
indeed be more informed than the professionals who earn a living but have
lost the love of their work, and as a result of the depth of their love some ama-
teurs might indeed make higher- quality artworks than the professionals.

A quick glance at any of the better photo-sharing networks online today
demonstrates this fact almost instantly: a great many amateur photographers
make fantastic, precise, and intentional photographs as good as any professional.
Conversely many professional photographers really are nothing more than
lucky snapshot-artists who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Some pros are the paid, but uninteresting, line cooks at the local greasy spoon.
Not always, of course; some professionals are outstanding artists. The same is true
in painting, illustration, design, writing, film, and many other creative pursuits.
Some bestsellers are hacks. Some bestsellers are artistic geniuses.

Meanwhile, more than once in recent years we've seen the entire art mar-
ket turned upside-down when an assertive amateur who's made some great
work gains online attention, goes viral, and then gets in the hottest galleries
and museums. It's a very exciting time to be an amateur or professional artist,
and we all have access to vast markets and hugely valuable marketing engines
across the Internet that didn't exist twenty years ago.

Backwards thinking is no great economy

One sign of community's ineptitude at handling great art is when the
managerial, community, or other interests are not on the art, but on some
form of economy-building or investment portfolio. Sometimes it's called "The
Creative Economy." When it distracts away from the art, the creative econo-
my is an empty shell of an idea that ends up peddling fiberglass sheep or cellos
painted by school kids, as if that were the best of our community's creativity.
One nightmare is that maybe such awful crap actually is the best that our
communities can muster.

The Mind's Eye 43

Gregory Scheckler

The storm has begun

And along with that shift between amateur and professional, and art and
economy, a storm has begun — actually a storm is well underway and we can
only hope to survive it.

I read somewhere that, in one day, over 380 million photos are uploaded
to Facebook. Surely most of these were casual snapshots of no artistic merit,
but fun to look at and share anyway. How many might qualify as fine art?
Perhaps 1 percent or l/1000th of 1 percent? That's still a few hundred every
day, thousands and thousands in a year, on only one of many social networks
across a much larger World Wide Web. In one day, the images uploaded to
the Web total more images than the entire known history of art.

Every art history book ever made contains none of this new art

And it's so much new art that probably never enough of it could ever
be contained in one book to tell the story of 21st century art. We're record-
ing and "artifying" everything, but we are doing it at such a great pace that
we can't keep track of most of it. And we must update Karsh's comment that
character, like a photo, develops in darkness. That comment makes sense in
the context of old-school, wet-chemistry darkroom photography. But in the
digital age, it is character borne of light turned to electrical impulses, Is and
0s. Character, like a digital photo, develops in flashes of millions of lines of
code. This storm is a raging hurricane with meteor strikes and massive tsuna-
mis, and, within them all, cameras and code are everywhere.

"Snowstorm: Shadows inside Lights series" 201 3, digital multiple exposure
photograph.

44 The Mind's Eye

Gregory Scheckler

Enter the storm of exceptions

The storm of new art imagery engulfing the planet is so large that, to be
an artist, there is no simplistic, straightforward canon of information to be
taught, indoctrinated, tested or verified.

Within a particular tradition or style of art there certainly are many ex-
pectations for form, concept, and levels of quality. But across styles and meth-
ods, much of the arts are idiosyncratic — not merely subjective (after all, visual
arts objects are right in front of you: objective as real physical facts, which of
course, objectively, you may find you like or dislike). Some traditions like the
realist painting I specialize in are very well codified. Others are totally explor-
atory and unpredictable.

Some art isn't even made by humans — well, not exactly. Just yesterday
in one of my classes we viewed a documentary photo project involving a tiny
digital camera carried by a cat. The cat takes the camera wherever it goes,
and the camera is programmed to take pictures at regular intervals. While a
person programmed the camera and mounted it on the cat's collar, the cat did
the moving, and the camera took the pictures on its own. So who's the author,
who is the artist? And yet the resulting photos are fascinating, showing many
views of the events in the cat's life. And often the images are beautiful, low-
angle photos of the world. In such cases, authorship is questionable, which
makes entire swaths of art educational dogma into irrelevant restrictions.

Despite the persistence of national curricular standards for high school
art training, there is always another art culture to learn from that wasn't in-
cluded in the curricula, always another artist somewhere in the world who
has made an interesting, provocative artwork that is completely different than
whatever the predominant modes of the day are.

I am not arguing here for relativism — far from it. I'm simply recognizing
the observable art world fact that there are thousands of art styles, and thou-
sands of art traditions, which have widely varying purposes and aesthetics:
the art world is so diverse that outside of the demands of a specific art style,
any dogmatic art curriculum is immediately suspect. Art manages to be a vast
group of things that, despite their commonalities, are each a storm of excep-
tions.

How do you become an artist? One way is to enter the storm. The pre-
eminent experimenter, British seascape and landscape painter Joseph Mallord
William Turner is said to have strapped himself to the top of a mast of a clip-
per ship during a storm, so that he could learn to feel what it's like to be inside
the weather system.

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Gregory Scheckler

He rode out a fierce thunderstorm, with waves breaching over the gun-
wales and smashing down the sails. He survived. Then he painted pictures of
it. If he had written stories inspired by the experience, he would have been a
writer, not a painter. The choice is utterly simple: Painter, during this storm,
which brush will you use for today's painting?

46 The Mind's Eye

Undergraduate Happiness:
Some Preliminary Field
Notes from the Classroom

Presented at Eastern Sociological Society 2013 (Boston)
BY JENNIFER ZOLTANSKI

Abstract

In this paper, I present field notes on the levels of happiness among past and
current undergraduates, drawing on materials developed in my seminar
on the sociology of happiness. While the primary purpose of my course
is to examine interdisciplinary research on happiness, students complete a
number of written assignments that allow them to connect their personal ex-
perience to larger societal arrangements and to apply the lessons of academic
research to their own private lives. In this paper, I discuss preliminary find-
ings on their subjective wellbeing, and what these findings might reveal about
general college student happiness today. Analysis of my data suggests that
MCLA students are less happy than the average middle-aged American, but
that this is due more to age than the particular college they attend.

The Mind's Eye 47

Jennifer Zoltanski

Introduction

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) is a public, four-year
institution located in North Adams, tucked away in the bucolic, but frig-
id, Northern Berkshires. Situated roughly three hours west of Boston, four
hours north of New York City, and three hours south of Montpelier (Ver-
mont), MCLA is located at the western-most edge of Massachusetts; a spot
I like to call the Bermuda Triangle. Although I have not assessed the affect
that location may have on happiness, I think it fair to say that North Adam's
size (roughly 13,000 residents) and remoteness pose particular challenges to
adventure-seeking, young college students. Although North Adams is home
to MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), it has few cof-
fee houses (one, or sometimes two, depending on the season), even fewer music
or dance clubs (zero at last count), a narrow range of restaurant choices (all of
which close down by around 9 p.m.), and few opportunities for retail therapy.
These constraints make for a fairly subdued campus, where extracurricular stu-
dent clubs and activities seem to take precedence over raucous partying.

This is my fourth year at MCLA as an assistant professor of sociology I
teach a range of courses, including those on criminology, law and society, geno-
cide, social movements, and social problems. Recently, I designed a course on
the sociology of happiness that I have taught for two consecutive semesters, with
a total enrollment of forty students. Because it is an upper-division seminar
class, students have been junior or senior sociology majors. Mirroring the Col-
lege's broader demographic characteristics, they have been largely white, female,
and mostly first-generation students. (MCLA demographic data indicates that
79 percent of students are white, 59 percent are female, and 77 percent are resi-
dents of Massachusetts. A good number are first-generation students.)

The happiness course takes an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing how
wellbeing is defined, measured, and achieved. Students examine theoretical and
empirical studies from a range of disciplines; including philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, psychology, biology, economics, and public policy. Throughout
the semester, they complete multiple writing assignments that allow them to
connect their personal happiness to larger societal arrangements, and apply the
lessons of academic research to their own private lives. So far, student work has
served two purposes: first, as a basis for grading their performance, and second,
as a valuable data set on college student happiness.

Is it me or is it them? College student malaise

Few college professors have deep insight into the subjective wellbeing
of their students. Professors may care deeply about their students, but their

48 The Mind's Eye

Jennifer Zoltanski

general happiness does not factor logically into courses on history, politi-
cal science, chemistry, or other academic disciplines. At the same time, the
work of teaching is intrinsically linked to our perceptions of student wellbe-
ing. Admittedly, we strive to design and teach magical classes that tap stu-
dent interest and generate enthusiasm for subject matter. Yet, during much
of my teaching career, I have found myself in a grey zone. Maybe I am simply
neurotic, but at some point in every semester, I find myself asking the in-
evitable: "What is going on with my class? The students seem so miserable!
They have become unreachable! Is it me or is it them?"

Like most committed teachers, I have assumed the brunt of responsibil-
ity and developed strategies to try to reach them and turn things around.
Sometimes my efforts simply don't work, and I ride the semester out with
my grumbling students in tow. I hear similar reports from my colleagues
at MCLA, and also from professors at colleges and universities around the
country. Professors complain about students; students complain about
classes and the professors who teach them. The website "Rate My Professor,
com" provides evidence of this fact. My recent interest in student discontent
has grown out of this conundrum, but with the goal of identifying the un-
derlying sources of student malaise. Are students unhappy because of col-
lege or did they come to college as unhappy people? Put another way, is their
discontent valid or is it displaced?

Is it possible that professors work with an inherently unhappy popula-
tion in the first place, so that even the most gifted and mystical teacher could
not conciliate them? I designed the happiness course with this in mind.
Armed with a thick course packet, happiness inventory and college student
stress tests, a positive psychology challenge, and techniques for assessing
economic happiness, I set out both to teach and to explore the terrain of col-
lege student happiness. As noted previously, my data suggests that yes — college
students appear to be less happy than the average middle-aged American. At
least that is how the ones enrolled in my happiness course at MCLA appear.

Measuring happiness

What is happiness'? We use many different terms to talk about this emo-
tional state, including "wellbeing," "life satisfaction," "subjective wellbeing,"
"flow," "contentment," "joy," "emotional wellbeing," "bliss," and others. In
her book The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being (2011), author
Carol Graham succinctly points out that "happiness" is perhaps the most
open-ended and least well-defined of the terms, although it is the one that
gets the most public attention and interest. The term also appears in the United

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Jennifer Zoltanski

States' Declaration of Independence" (p. 5). It is hard to imagine the Declara-
tion without the word "happiness." Imagine the founders arguing that we all
are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of "contentment," or "life satisfaction"
or even "bliss"! Perhaps they chose the term "happiness" precisely because it is
vague, open-ended, and applicable to "all men" (today, taken to be understood as
"all people"). Happiness researchers have not had it as easy. They have had to get
very precise about denning this slippery concept in order to measure and study it
as accurately as possible. Put another way, in order to get closer to understand-
ing the contours and sources of happiness, they have had to develop solid opera-
tional definitions of it. And they have. Today, researchers tend to agree that the
most valid way to measure "happiness" is to allow people to report their own
wellbeing in different domains of their life; including health, work, housing, re-
lationships, parenthood, education, and more. Positive psychologists in par-
ticular have specialized in devising surveys (also known as happiness inven-
tories) that allow respondents to assess their own state of wellbeing in these
and other domains. Numerous happiness websites now exist that do exactly
this, including the University of Pennsylvania's "Authentic Happiness" site,
which boasts "more than two million users from around the world." (www.
authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) Users can log in and complete dozens of
inventories that measure their own life satisfaction, social connectedness,
and life purpose, to generate stand-alone happiness scores and/or evaluate
their score in relation to their age, gender, and professional cohort. Even
better, websites such as this have become clearinghouses of statistically valid
databases for happiness researchers. A brilliant idea to say the least: allow
people to evaluate their own happiness while simultaneously gathering and
maintaining a dataset on happiness from a large, randomly sampled group
of people, from all walks of life. As a result, positive psychologists are on the
cutting edge of both understanding the sources of human happiness while
also promoting its achievement.

Authentic or inauthentic happiness: that is the question

As noted previously, students in the happiness seminar are required to
take a battery of happiness inventory tests and then discuss whether they be-
lieve their scores accurately measure their "wellbeing." I ask them to visit the
University of Pennsylvania "Authentic Happiness" website to take three spe-
cific tests. These include the: 1) Authentic Happiness Test (measures subjec-
tive happiness based on experiences over the past week); 2) Satisfaction with
Life Scale (measures feelings of contentment with work, friendships, life pur-
pose, and more); and 3) Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire (measures

50 The Mind's Eye

Jennifer Zoltanski

pathways to "happiness," and the degree to which people "love their life").
They also complete one additional test of their choosing (which have ranged
from "The Character Strength Test," "The Compassionate Love Scales," and
"The Depression Test," to "The Perseverance" or "grit" test). Students pres-
ent and discuss their test scores in class, and also write a reflective essay
about the perceived validity of their scores.

Curiously (or maybe not so), students tend to downgrade the accuracy
of the tests and their own scores when it suits them. Consistently, they point
out that the questions are either too open-ended or vague to "accurately"
capture their state of being at the moment they took the test. A common
complaint that students make goes something like this: "My test scores were
way lower than I expected! How can anyone expect to measure anything
as complicated as happiness? It is just too subjective — everyone has his or
her own definition of it! It's up to the individual to decide. There is no way
to measure it! These tests are stupid!" Better yet, students report that they
figured out ways to "outsmart" the assessment tests— answering questions
more often in the affirmative than in the neutral or negative, then mirac-
ulously obtaining higher scores than they would anticipate. Humorously,
they go on to fault the test designers for not being attuned to "the tendency"
for respondents to exaggerate. Yet, in the end, they seem completely oblivi-
ous to the fact that they have only outsmarted themselves! After all, the
tests are designed to help respondents gauge their own state of wellbeing
as accurately as they care to; the inventories are tools of self-awareness and
potential self-improvement, not tests in the strict sense of the word. Perhaps
this ambivalence to authentic happiness inventories can be taken as a gauge
of general test fatigue (in response to nationwide efforts to "test and assess"
high school readiness for graduation and entry into college), more than
anything else. Maybe students finally have mastered the art of test-taking
in spite of themselves. Whatever the case, one thing I believe this exercise
teaches is that "happiness," along with most variables worth investigating,
is indeed slippery and not something easily defined or measured. My hope
is that, despite their cynicism, students come to appreciate that while these
tests may be imperfect, they do get us closer to understanding a squishy hu-
man emotion we sometimes call "happiness."

MCLA student unhappiness

Preliminary analyses of my students' happiness test scores show some
interesting patterns. Recall that over two semesters, forty students have tak-
en the "Authentic Happiness," the "Approaches to Life," and the "Satisfaction

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Jennifer Zoltanski

with Life" inventories. Their aggregate average scores on these tests are sum-
marized below:

1. Authentic Happiness Inventory: Student average at 2.99 points (on
a 1-5 scale) with a range of 2.46 to 3.54. Their average suggests that
they are somewhat happy but slightly less so than their peer cohort.

2. Approaches to Life Inventory: Student average 2.84 points (on a
1-5 scale) with a range of 2.17 to 4.00. Their average indicates that
they are somewhat content and en par with their peer cohort.

3. Satisfaction with Life Scale: Student average 25 points (on a 5-35
scale) with a range of 17-31. Their average indicates that they are
just barely "satisfied," but come close to the average for people in
economically developed nations. (Those who score 30-35 are high-
ly satisfied, 25-29 are satisfied, 20-24 are slightly satisfied, and 15-19
are below average.)

At first glance, MCLA students (and their peer cohort) appear to be do-
ing okay. They are not ecstatic, nor are they miserable; they are somewhere
in the comfortable middle. Yet, the thing that strikes me about MCLA stu-
dents (and their peer cohort scores), is that they are substantially lower than
the averages of those of people in my age and professional cohort. My av-
erages for all of these tests (like those of my age and professional cohort)
range from mid-three up to five points. This difference corresponds with
research that shows a strong positive correlation between age and happiness.
Happiness levels drastically decline between young and middle adulthood,
when they make a remarkable reversal. A graph of this across time would
resemble a letter "U." New York Times' Nickolas Bakalar (2010) summarizes
this trend nicely:

On a global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty
happy about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw
them curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit age 50. At
that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier
as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with
themselves than they were at 18 (Bakalar).

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Jennifer Zoltanski

Below, is an example of this graph:

The U-Bend

Self-reported well-being, on a scale of 1-10

6.2

_i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i A?

18- 26- 34- 42- 50- 58- 66- 74- 82-
21 29 37 46 53 61 69 77 85

Age, years

Source: PNAS paper: "A snapshot of the age distribution of
psychological well-being in the United States" by Arthur Stone

The U-shaped age-happiness graph

Age and happiness are strongly positively related. Along with age, we
know (intuitively) that college professors enjoy much more prestige, autono-
my, and job security than college students; this helps to explain differences in
happiness levels, but may make comparisons seem unfair. However, I see it a
bit like comparing oranges and tangerines. Students and faculty clearly have
a symbiotic relationship — students learn from us, but we also learn from
them. They bring their contentment and "love for life" into classrooms, and
vice versa. Ideally, if student and professor scores matched along the happi-
ness continuums, classrooms probably would be more consistently lively and
upbeat for both parties. Unfortunately, my experience with students often
feels more like this exchange between Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore:

"Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.

"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore, gloomily. "If it is a good
morning, which I doubt," he says.

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Jennifer Zoltanski

"Why, what's the matter?"

"Nothing, Pooh Bear. Nothing. We cant all, and some of us don't.
That's all there is to it."

"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go 'round the mulberry bush."
"Oh!" said Pooh. He thought for a long time, and then asked, "What
mulberry bush is that?"

"Bon-hommy," went on Eeyore, gloomily. "French word meaning
bonhommy," he explained. "I'm not complaining, but There It Is."
(Milne and Sheppard 1928)

College student depression and suicide

Preliminary analysis of MCLA happiness inventory data reveals that
professors indeed work with a less-than-happy population. Rates of student-
diagnosed depression and suicide are perhaps the best (though extreme)
proxy measures of unhappiness. Recent reports on these variables are in fact
quite alarming. For example, the American College Counseling Associa-
tion (ACCA) estimates that the number of students who seek psychological
help has doubled in the past 12 years; roughly 37 percent of college students
sought help for psychological problems in 2012, verses 16 percent in 2000
(DeMeglio 2012; Turner 2011). In a similar study, The American College
Health Association finds that suicide ranks as the leading cause of death among
college/university populations. An American Psychological Association study
found a 10 percent increase in the number of students on psychiatric medica-
tions over the past decade (Dagher 2011). These reports suggest that students
struggle emotionally with college life, and that this struggle manifests along a
spectrum of mild to severe depression, which may lead to suicide. It would be
good and useful to know how the happiness of MCLA compares with that of
students at other similarly ranked schools. Because my research is in its early
stages, I have not yet discovered comparative datasets.

Making lemonade out of lemons: the positive psychology challenge

Thus, research shows that student discontent is related to both age and col-
lege life. To reiterate, young people generally are less happy than middle-aged
and the elderly. Most college students must deal with the strain of newfound
independence, competitive academic environments, and homesickness. Those
beginning to hone their professional careers also feel less secure, more anxious
about confronting their futures, and are understandably less content than

54 The Mind's Eye

Jennifer Zoltanski

those who have met these challenges and are figuratively "over the hill." This
is not to say that all faculty are 50 and beginning the "happy" phase of their
lives, or that all students are 20 and miserable, but rather that meaningful
work, job security, and social prestige do bring greater contentment, regard-
less of age.

Bearing the fact of student malaise in mind, I introduce students to
positive psychology and happiness. As a theoretical paradigm, positive psy-
chology argues that the sources of happiness are individual and internal.
Happiness is viewed as something we each construct in relation to our ex-
periences in our external worlds (Deurzen 2009; Weil 2011). As practice,
positive psychology argues that we control our happiness destiny by deciding
how to interpret and manage our responses to our external social world. As a
self-help model, positive psychology (for better or worse) instructs us that we
are in the driver's seat; ultimately what matters to our happiness is whether
we can make lemonade out of lemons. It all boils down to attitude. In an ef-
fort to explore and apply this perspective, students are instructed on a range
of positive psychology strategies and then are asked to take the 5/5 challenge:
choose 5 strategies and practice them for 5 consecutive days to determine if
they are objectively and subjectively helpful. How? They revisit and retake
the Authentic Happiness Inventory Test to obtain a baseline or pretest score.
Next, they choose five workable positive psychology strategies and practice
them each for five days (keeping a journal log of their activities), and then re-
take the Happiness Inventory Test a second time to compare results. As fol-
low up, they write a formal essay that evaluates objective (pre -and post-test
happiness inventory scores) and subjective (what they felt worked or did not
work in terms of contentment) outcomes. Did they see an increase/ decrease
in their happiness scores? If so, do they feel that they can attribute the changes
to positive psychology? I have kept track of what seems to matter to student
assessments of positive psychology strategies. What follows is a summary
of attempted verses effective positive psychology strategies (though not in
ranked order):

Attempted positive psychology strategies

Physical exercise (30 or more minutes per day)
Gratitude list (three items per day)
Cut TV viewing by one half per day
Smile/say "hello" to a stranger
Daily act of kindness

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Jennifer Zoltanski

Have one good laugh per day

Talk to a friend (one time per day)

Spend time alone (half hour or more per day)

Growing/caring for a plant

Give yourself a treat

Go somewhere you have never been

Effective positive psychology strategies

Cut TV viewing by one half per day
Have one good laugh per day
Gratitude list
Spending time alone
Growing/caring for plant
Talk to a friend
Physical exercise

Go somewhere you have never been

Getting Eeyore closer to bonhommy

The positive psychology challenge produced surprising results even in
the most skeptical students. After practicing strategies, nearly all students
reported seeing increases in their Authentic Happiness scores, some more
pronounced than others. Based on my analysis of their qualitative essays,
students appeared to benefit most from strategies that allowed them to focus
their energies on personal achievement and real (not virtual) relationships.
For instance, many students chose to cut their TV viewing by one half. Some
went further and cut Facebook and Twitter out of their lives for five days.
Many confided that this was very difficult in the beginning (much like an ad-
diction), but by day three they reported feeling liberated from the obsession
with TV, Facebook and Twitter. In their essays, they reported that they had
more time to focus on homework, spend time with friends, pets, and them-
selves, which gave them deep feelings of satisfaction. Talking to a friend
reportedly improved their subjective happiness by increasing their sense
of social connectedness — and allegedly improved mood and sleep patterns
among those students who practiced this strategy. Spending time alone and

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Jennifer Zoltanski

physical exercise also were beneficial. Finally, many students reported that
planting seeds or caring for a mature plant substantially boosted their per-
ceived happiness. In my view, this practice gave them a sense of purpose
and aesthetically livened up their sterile dorm rooms. These findings tell
us something very important about the sociology of positive psychology:
ultimately much of human happiness is in fact generated by activities that
transcend the "individual," and instead figure very centrally on the collec-
tive — our relationship to others and how we derive a sense of individual
contentment from this. Talking to friends, caring for plants, gratitude lists,
laughing in the company of others, and cutting media time all act as exit
routes away from the "me" toward the "we."

I have made it a point to explore student discontent in relation to the
"American Dream" ideology. After all, we live in a society that emphasizes
individual achievement and accumulation of material wealth. Could these
pursuits produce unhappiness? Students learn that despite its high Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) ranking (a measure of economic wellbeing), the
United States ranks substantially lower in terms of happiness than nations
that are organized around principles of collectivism or socialism. For in-
stance, people in Costa Rica, Norway, and Denmark all rank as "happier"
(first, second, and third, consistently) than their American counterparts
(twelfth and sometimes lower), despite their comparative lower GDP (Bryner
2010). Researchers have argued that economic standing is a poor proxy for
either individual or national happiness, giving rise to the paradox of the hap-
py peasant and the miserable millionaire (Graham 2009). What students
glean from cross-cultural studies of happiness is that what seems to matter
the most to human happiness is tangible and perceived social welfare in forms
such as basic material wellbeing (i.e., safe/secure housing, food, potable wa-
ter), good health and health care services, social bonds/connectedness, and
meaningful work. At the macro level, political stability, democratic rule,
and social and environmental justice also play major roles in human con-
tentment. For example, Costa Rica (which ranked number-one in happiness
levels in 2010) demilitarized in the 1970s, which allowed for major realloca-
tion of tax dollars to fund education, health care, jobs creation, environmen-
tal conservation, and sustainability that reduced gender pay/opportunity
inequities, restored trust in elected officials and strengthened the national
economy (Kristof 2010).

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Jennifer Zoltanski

Conclusions

So, what to make of all of this? For me, the project of both teaching happi-
ness and learning about MCLA student wellbeing generated much food for
thought, including:

The students' desire to "cheat" on their happiness tests suggests
something interesting about how deeply the ideas of the Declara-
tion of Independence have penetrated into the sense of ourselves
as Americans. Apparently, we've all internalized the belief that we
not only have the right to pursue happiness, but an obligation to be
happy. Unhappiness seems downright un-American.

College professors work with an inherently unhappy population,
mainly due to age, but also to student career/professional immaturity
If we understand that much student discontent is beyond our peda-
gogical control, some of our own job-related stress could be reduced.

Research shows a strong correlation between stress, depression,
and unhappiness. Stress can trigger depression, and depression
produces stubborn discontent in ways that physical injury does not.
Many people appear to adapt to physical injury in ways that people
with depression cannot (Brickman & Coates 1978; Kolbert 2010).
Knowing this, I had my students take the "College Student's Stress-
ful Event" inventory, which measures stress along a mild to severe
continuum. They averaged 272 points, indicating moderate stress.
More importantly, no student fell into the mildly stressed category
(<150 points), although several fell into the category of severely
stressed (>300 points). This finding suggests that professors deal
not only with an inherently unhappy population, but also a pretty
anxious one, as well.

Given that suicide is the leading cause of student deaths across the
nation, it is imperative that colleges and universities, including
MCLA, make mental health awareness and treatment a priority
(Turner 2011; DeMeglio 2012), not only for the wellbeing of their
students, but also for the wellbeing of the professors who teach them.

Finally, more thorough comparative research is needed on happi-

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Jennifer Zoltanski

ness, depression, and suicide rates across colleges and universities.
Such research would allow MCLA to understand more fully how
the school's institutional environment affects its students and would
allow it to fine tune mental health services available to them.

Bibliography

A.A. Milne and E.H. Sheppard (Illustrator). 1928. The House at Pooh Corner.

Methuen & Company Ltd. London.
Bakalar, Nicholas. 2012. "Happiness May Come With Age, A Study Says." The

New York Times.

Bryner, Jeanna. 2010. "The U.S. May Be the Richest Nation, But It's Not
the Happiest." Christian Science Monitor. www.csmonitor.com/Sci-
ence/20 10/0701 /The Retrieved September 2012.

Brickman, Philip and Dan Coates. 1978. "Lottery Winners and Accident Vic-
tims: Is Happiness Relative?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy. 36:8, pp. 917-927.

Dagher, Nora. 2011. "Suicide: Number One Killer of College Students?" The
Michigan Review, www.michiganreview.com/archives/3623. Retrieved
September 2012.

DeMeglio, Francesca. 2012. "Stress Takes Its Toll on College Students." Bloom-
berg Business Week, www.businessweek.com/articles/20 12-05- 10/ stress-
takes-its-toll-on-college-students. Retrieved March 24, 2013.

Graham, Carol. 2009. Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peas-
ants and Miserable Millionaires. Oxford University Press. New York.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. 20 1 0. "Everybody Have Fun: What Can Policymakers Learn
from Happiness Research?" The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/arts/
critics/books/2010/03/22/10032. Retrieved September 2012.

Kristof, Nickolas. 2012. "The Happiest People." The New York Times, www.
nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07/kristof.html? Retrieved Sep-

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Jennifer Zoltanski

tember 2012.

Turner, James MD. 201 1. "Leading Causes of Mortality among American Col-
lege Students at Four- Year Institutions." Elson Student Health Center
Report. University of Virginia, news.virginia.edu/content/more-us-
college-students-die-suicide-alcohol-related-causes-uva-researchers-
find. Retrieved March 24, 2013.

Van Deurzen, Emmy. 2009. Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness. Sage
Publications. Thousand Oaks, California.

Weil, Andrew 2011. Spontaneous Happiness: A New Path to Emotional Wellbe-
ing. Little Brown & Company. New York.

Thank you Michele Ethier, Shawn Rosenheim, and C.R. for your helpful
editorial suggestions.

60 The Mind's Eye

Reflections on the Craft of
Teaching

BY GLENN A. CROSBY

I am a professor of chemistry and materials science. At a recent dinner
with friends, the conversation drifted to the topic of teaching, and I re-
lated an experience Id had at my university. I had been asked to deliver a
lecture on the subject of instruction styles and "tricks of the trade" to a general
audience of teaching fellows, teaching assistants and assistant professors.

What could I, a scientist, tell my audience about the craft of teaching?
The university lecture program was created by people in the humanities and
the social sciences; there was not a science or engineering scholar in atten-
dance. The room was mostly filled with women; the single male was a history
professor. Having spent my professional life lecturing on principles of chem-
istry, physics, and mathematics, I gradually became aware that the lecture was
going to be a challenge.

I started by talking about myself, a safe topic. I have a sugar problem and
I'm at my best in the early morning. I make up my lectures and exams in the
morning, I write my research proposals and my manuscripts in the morning,
and I always try to schedule my classes for the morning. If the latter cannot be

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Glenn A. Crosby

arranged, then I must be careful to eat something shortly before the lecture or
I simply don't perform well. I know it and the students know it. After class, as
I collect my notes, one of them might say to me, "Don't you feel well today?"
This is, of course, a gentle hint that I gave a lousy lecture. So, I always plan my
days around my own natural rhythm. As I toil away in my office in the early
mornings, I dread the sensation of the pressure changing in the building; it
means the students and faculty are beginning to arrive and my creative time
has ended. My research students will enter the office complex, the lab pumps
will start to run, the phone will begin to ring, and people will pound on my
door. With a short glance at my notes, I'm off to the lecture hall. If I've eaten
a good, large breakfast, and if I've prepared in advance, then all will go well
and I will make it through the morning in top form.

I have a second personal matter to consider — preparing in advance. For
some inexplicable reason, I cannot prepare a lecture right before delivering it.
If for unavoidable circumstances this happens, the lecture doesn't go well —
nothing flows, my thoughts collide, and I mix the end with the beginning.
Even an outline won't really help me; I still become flustered. I noticed the
problem years ago, and solved it by the simple act of preparing my lectures
days ahead of time. Immediately before the lecture, I need only look at my
notes, perhaps write down a detail or two, and ruminate for a few moments
on the topics to be included. Ten minutes often will suffice and the lecture
will go smoothly. Evidently, in the period between crafting my notes and giv-
ing the lecture, my mind processes the material and arranges it in a rational
sequence. Even talking about topics that are very familiar to me will not go
well unless I've prepared the lecture at least a few days in advance. I know my
own mind and I cannot interfere with the way it works.

What other elements should be considered when planning a lecture?
Humor can add leavening and some professors even tell jokes, but I never
do. If a humorous event occurs naturally, then I take advantage of the occa-
sion to lighten the lesson, but just telling a joke as an aside is not my style. I
routinely performed demonstrations in my classes and the students really en-
joyed them, but there was always a central principle being illustrated. There
is a fine line that separates conveying serious content and merely entertain-
ing students. When I came close to that line, I recognized the danger and
retreated. Periodically I did put on demonstrations only for show: The Color
of Chemistry. It was entertainment, and it was advertised as entertainment.

As we all know, in any group of students there are all types of learn-
ers. For some, the concept of a partial molar volume, and the fact that vol-
umes not always prove additive, is neatly buried in a mathematical symbol.

62 The Mind's Eye

Glenn A. Crosby

They get it. They can work with the idea and are comfortable with it. Oth-
ers must be shown. When I mix 50 milliliters of alcohol with 50 milliliters
of water and the final volume is only 95 milliliters, they get it — it is experi-
mental fact. Still, others cannot comprehend it on a molecular level — nei-
ther the mathematics nor the visible experiment sinks in. Molecules are
too abstract for them. They need something more concrete. I construct a
thought experiment in which a gallon of golf balls is poured into a two-gal-
lon container. A gallon of BB shot is added and the mixture is thoroughly
shaken. Finally, they get it. They can visualize that the volume of the mix-
ture is NOT two gallons because the BBs occupy the interstices between the
golf balls. Once a student can imagine it, the realization that alcohol mol-
ecules are not the same size as water molecules becomes clear, and it is not
such a great leap to the mathematical symbol and its meaning. A skilled
lecturer ripples up and down the ladder from the concrete to the abstract
and back again, until most of the class understands the idea and is ready to
grasp why the partial molar quantity is denned in the first place, its impor-
tance in some areas of science, and how to use the concept with confidence.

There is another learning factor to consider, especially for those of us
in technical fields. Many students are speaking English as a second lan-
guage. Although I made no effort to modify my lecturing style to accom-
modate them, for exams I tried to be fair. I arranged the schedule so students
could come early (7:30 a.m. for an 8:10 to 9 a.m. exam) so that anyone who
wanted more time could have it. Most of the American students came at
8 o'clock, but the foreign students came early. They needed the extra half
hour. I understand their need because I am considered to be fluent in Ger-
man, but I still read that language and comprehend it only about two-thirds
the speed of written English. Scheduling the exams to allow slow readers
(and anyone else) to be comfortable is, in my opinion, a matter of fairness.

Another systemic problem that has grown over the years — until some
classes are literally suffocated by it — is the gradual increase in size and com-
plexity of textbooks. Especially in the sciences the texts' ancillary materials
(slides, overheads, outlines, exam questions, problem sets, etc.) can over-
whelm the student and, sadly, the instructor. If the teacher uses all the ad-
ditional information, control of the course switches from the lecturer to the
textbook authors. In addition, even though the authors placed in the text
what they thought were the principal ideas of the field, often they didn't pre-
pare the augmenting supplements. Yet, the student is forced to focus on what
is in those pages. Moreover, a text, even a celebrated, successful one, may
not emphasize what the instructor wants the students to carry away from the

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Glenn A. Crosby

course. I found that what I wanted my students to learn often was not re-
flected in the problem sets provided in the text; I usually found the problems
to be uninteresting or trivial or irrelevant to my intentions for the course.

In the sciences, working problems is an effective way to internalize a sub-
ject or a concept; thus, problem assignments become significant. I learned
early in my career to ignore all ancillary textbook materials; I asked students
to study designated sections, and I wrote my own problem sets. Creating
my problem sets produced an epiphany — I found that crafting problems re-
quired me to cogitate on ideas in a manner different from the way I thought
about lecturing on the very same ideas. A problem could be designed to
have many parts, each part extending the main idea in new directions, which
gave me new ways to explain concepts — ways I had never thought of before.
My specially crafted problems focused the students on what I wanted them
to learn, and fewer problem were necessary to make my point. As I cre-
ated the problems sets, I also designed my exams, and thus the test questions
were relevant to my learning goals for the student. I was in charge of the
course and what I wanted my students to learn, the tests were relevant to
the concepts elaborated in the lectures, and student learning did improve!

I have the reputation of being a good lecturer; in fact, students have tossed
a few accolades my way. During an interview I once was asked what my rules
for teaching a good course were. I have three: (1) Know what you're talking
about. This may sound trivial, but it's not. Some concepts in the sciences are
difficult, really deep, and even a seasoned scientist must spend hours and
hours chewing on such fundamental topics to be able to lead the class to the
depth of understanding required if students are to become comfortable with
the ideas. (2) The students must perceive that you are working as hard, or
harder than they are. If you're not putting in the effort, they'll soon discover
your fakery and will lose respect for you. (3) You can be as demanding as
you wish, but you must be fair. This includes relating the tests to the subject
being taught, assigning problems that are relevant and meaningful, and craft-
ing tests so that hardworking students can earn respectable scores on exams.

Finally, I come to the most important responsibility of the instructor — to
highlight the main points of a lecture and drive home the BIG ideas. Some
ideas simply are not as important as others — the relative atomic mass of natu-
rally occurring iron is a construct of nature, useful in chemical and engi-
neering computations; the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is
neither created nor destroyed, but merely changes its form (in normal, low-
energy terrestrial reactions). The former holds only minor importance; the
latter is a BIG idea with enormous implications. Some lecturers never dwell

64 The Mind's Eye

Glenn A. Crosby

on the distinction. At the end of some of my lectures I would say, "If you
didn't understand this and this, you can still pass the course, but if you don't
get THIS, then you're in trouble!" Some concepts are far more important
than others, and it is necessary that the lecturer understand the distinction
and make clear the concepts' relative importance.

The Mind's Eye 65

How Do You Learn Science?

BY NICK STROUD

Walking along a local hiking trail, I wonder aloud to my son why the
stream we are crossing is shaped like a big "C," instead of a straight
line. We scan along the stream banks for clues and poke around in the
water. As we continue on the trail, we spot a small card attached to a
tree. The card has some brief instructions about how to use a mobile
phone to learn about some science at this location. Intrigued, I pull
out my phone, take a picture of the QR code on the card and I am
immediately brought to a site explaining the science behind how an
oxbow (our "C") is created in a stream. It's as if a shroud has been
peeled away, revealing a new, and even more intriguing, view of the
dynamic stream in front of us.

In the coming decades, the ways in which individuals interact with the
world undoubtedly will continue to be changed by technology. This pres-
ents an incredible opportunity for learning outside of school, and espe-
cially for learning science. Two emerging trends are converging to allow new
opportunities in science learning; ones in which instances like the vignette
above will be woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.

The first is the widespread adoption of mobile devices and their use as
not only a communication device, but also as a tool to create and share con-

The Mind's Eye 67

Nick Stroud

tent. The type of activity supported by mobile devices continues to expand,
encouraging an explosion in the number and quality of software applications
("apps") developed for these devices. The simplest mobile phone available
in the current market not only has more processing power than the Apollo
11 computers, but also includes a camera and a Global Positioning System
(GPS). Putting what essentially are miniaturized computers into our hands is
not merely a technological marvel, but may also alter the way children inter-
act with each other and with their surroundings.

As they open up new ways of interacting, mobile devices present unique
opportunities for the development of learning experiences. One of these
strengths is the ability of mobile devices to turn individuals into content cre-
ators. A simple example is the kind of social media content individuals can
create through Facebook or Twitter. Creating content can empower individu-
als to explore their interests, and can shift their perspective from learner to
teacher. In allowing such shifts to become more commonplace, mobile de-
vices rapidly can change the dynamic between student and teacher. Allow-
ing students to act as teachers can, and does, happen in classrooms, but such
shifts are more frequent outside of school. In these instances, students are free
to create, teach, and learn in a fluid fashion. In essence then, mobile devices,
harnessed properly, can become effective tools for teaching and learning. Us-
ing the vignette as an example, a previous visitor to the oxbow in the stream
may have used their mobile device to share their ideas on how that formation
was created, harnessing the power of mobile devices as teaching tools.

The second trend is the increasing acknowledgement that a great deal
of learning, especially in the case of science, occurs outside the confines of
school classrooms. From museums and aquaria to "citizen science" projects
and media reports, these learning experiences are gaining prominence as im-
portant examples of science learning. The kinds of learning experiences in-
dividuals encounter outside of school, whether they are of school age or not,
can be especially salient for science learning because of their ability to spark
interest, be tied to real-world scenarios, and focus on the process of science
rather than a correct answer. In these settings, individuals may engage in
practices that can be considered scientific (such as asking questions, making
observations, and looking at evidence), as well as bring a wealth of knowledge
acquired through daily living and functioning within a community. If we first
can recognize these practices and "funds of knowledge" (as the researchers
Luis Moll and colleagues in the early 1990s termed the stores of knowledge
individuals and communities acquire over time in order to function), then
we can leverage them to deepen and expand the definition of science learn-

68 The Mind's Eye

Nick Stroud

ing into a more rich and varied tapestry of knowledge and practices than can
possibly be woven within schools. This is not to say that learning science in
school is not worthwhile or without its place, but it is important to distinguish
and recognize the unique and important facets of learning science outside of
school.

Pulling together the two threads of mobile devices as teaching and learn-
ing devices, and the unique features of science learning outside of school, I
envision a changing dynamic in the way individuals learn science. Allowing
individuals to explore scientific questions of interest to them, and making
that process interactive, can be accomplished through an on-demand, mobile
science learning tool. I hope to see this type of tool become a regular part of
how individuals explore science, and I believe it will lead people to question
the science behind their everyday experiences. For me, this goal is worth
working toward and working on, and I believe we all will be better off if we
can come close to attaining it.

Further reading:

• The New Media Consortium's (NMC) Horizon Report annually details re-
search-based educational technologies at various adoption "horizons," in-
cluding "one year or less," "two to three years," and "four to five years." The
latest one for K-12 education can be found here: www.nmc.org/horizon-
project/horizon-reports/horizon-report-k-12-edition.

• "Funds of Knowledge" research on the kinds of knowledge individuals bring
to bear on new learning situations: Moll, L. C, Amanti, C, Neff, D., & Gon-
zalez, N. (1992). Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative
Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2),
132-141.

• Commentary on the idea that "School is not where most Americans learn
most of their science," Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (2010). The 95 Percent
Solution. American Scientist, 98, 486-493.

• A recent op-ed piece on the role of museums in developing critical thinking:

Bartels, D. M. (2013). Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Class-
room. Scientific American.

The Mind's Eye 69

Teaching and Learning
With Henry Giroux

BY SETH KERSHNER

As a counterpoint to the current hand-wringing over public educa-
tion in the United States, it may be helpful to remember that we
will spend a comparatively small amount of time during our lives as
students in the classroom. That the focus thus far has been on teachers and
tests should not surprise us, however. These are tangible and measurable
aspects of education. It happens to be much harder to reform — or even to
keep track of— the educational force of culture. What does that force look
like? As C. Wright Mills put it in his famous BBC address, "The Cultural
Apparatus," we base our understanding of the world around us not only on
schools, but also on "the observation posts, the interpretation centers" and
"presentation depots" of the mass media and entertainment industry (Mills
406). "Taken as a whole," Mills continued, "the cultural apparatus is the lens
of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they interpret
and report what they see" (Mills 406). The media's overpowering influence
in our lives and the fact that we never actually confront pristine reality (only
a mediated version thereof), raises the question: Could the cultural appara-
tus be the most influential teacher we ever have?

70 The Mind's Eye

Seth Kershner

Mills, of course, was speaking more than a half-century ago. In search
of a more contemporary take on the matter, I spoke with Henry Giroux, a
former professor at Penn State and currently the Global Television Network
Chair of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Giroux is author or co-author of more than 50 books,
including The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Aca-
demic Complex (Paradigm, 2007) and his newest work, Youth in Revolt: Re-
claiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm, 2013). Professor Giroux calls the
educational influence of mass culture "public pedagogy" and has, over the
years, used the examples of Disney films and popular television shows like
Mad Men to expose and critique the embedded pedagogy of popular culture.
As he remarked in our interview, "The most powerful educational force in
the U.S. is not the schools, it's outside the schools."

I talked with him last February about public pedagogy, the promotion of
pro-military values in schools, and organized efforts by students themselves
to resist these trends.

SK: I just got back from San Diego, where my colleague and I spoke with young
people who had been student activists in their high school. These kids and
their peers had become radicalized after their principal cut back on their col-
lege-prep curriculum to make way for a JROTC unit.' These students — many
of whom were Latino and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds —
could no longer take AP Spanish, but they could learn marksmanship on the
campus's JROTC firing range.

HG: This is an important issue and symptomatic of a much larger problem.
Public schools are not simply being corporatized, they are also subjected in-
creasingly to a militarizing logic that disciplines the bodies of young people,
especially low income and poor minorities, and shapes their desires and
identities in the service of military values and social relations. For a lot of
these young people, there are only a few choices here: you can be unemployed
and hopefully be able to participate in some way in the social safety net, you
can take a low-income job, you can end up in prison or you can go into the

The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program (JROTC) is now present in more than
3,000 high schools across the country, enrolling more than 400,000 14- to 18-year-old "cadets."
Students enrolled in JROTC — which the Pentagon describes as a citizenship training program,
not a recruiting operation — receive classroom instruction in citizenship, history and "military
science" from retired military personnel; practice military drill formation; and attend school in
uniform once a week. Some JROTC units even have firing ranges on campus so that cadets can
train to be . . . well . . . good citizens. For more on student-led resistance to JROTC, see Harding
& Kershner and Lagotte.

The Mind's Eye 71

Seth Kershner

military. And it seems to me that increasingly the military is becoming the
best option of all of those. So you have a whole generation which — by vir-
tue of this massive inequality — really has very limited choices. But also you
have these institutions that are basically there to socialize kids, telling them
the only way to succeed is to join the military-industrial complex, and that
there really are no other options, at least for them. Moreover, as these young
people are subject to the warring logics of a militarized society, a society in
which life itself is increasingly absorbed into a war machine, it becomes dif-
ficult for them to imagine a social order that can be otherwise, one that is
organized around democratic values.

SK: Like this program I've been following: it's called STARBASE. This is a
Defense Department program that every year reaches around 70,000 students
in over 1,000 schools - the majority of them in fifth grade. Pitched as a way
to supplement school curriculum in the STEM (science, technology, engineer-
ing, mathematics) fields, there's an insidious element of military marketing
at work: soldiers "mentor" students enrolled in this program and most of the
instruction takes place at military installations. As part of the program, stu-
dents are given plenty of time to horse around on "cool" military hardware.

HG: It's mind-blowing. I think what we often forget — and this is something
that you and others like yourself are trying to make clear — is that when you
talk about the militarization of American society you're not just talking about
increasing the military budget or arming the police with military- style weapons
and so forth. You're also talking about the militarization of a culture in which
military values and relationships permeate every aspect of what C. Wright Mills
called the cultural apparatus — schools, fashion, movies and screen culture.
Violence becomes the only shared relationship that we have to each other, the
only mediating form through which people can now solve problems. More
insidiously, it defines our sense of identity and personal liberation through
violence both as a mediating force and as a source of pleasure and entertain-
ment. It's one of the reasons why the majority of people in the U.S. support
state-sanctioned torture. How do you explain that? It's really a culture that's
become so saturated in this military/violent mindset that it has lost any sense
of critical thought and ethical responsibility and has little understanding of
what a democratic society might look like.

SK: Militarism in the schools is of course just one aspect of a larger culture of
militarism in the U.S. And this gets at your notion of public pedagogy, doesn't it?

72 The Mind's Eye

Seth Kershner

HG: I may be terribly wrong, but I think the central issue here is that, first of
all, you have to realize that the educational force of the culture represents the
most important pedagogical force at work in the United States, Canada, and
in many other countries. This is not to suggest that schools are not involved
in the process of teaching and learning. But I think we commit a grave mis-
take when we assume that schools are the only place where learning goes
on. I would be willing to argue — and I have argued — that the most powerful
educational force in the U.S. is not the schools, it's outside the schools. Young
people are awash in a public pedagogy that is distributed across numerous sites
that extend from movies and the Internet, readily amplified through a range
of digital apparatuses that include cell phones, computers, and other electronic
registers of the new and expanded cultural flows. When schools fail to make
a connection between knowledge and everyday life — between knowledge and
these ever- expanding cultural apparatuses - they fail to understand, interrogate,
and question the educational forces that are having an enormous influence on
children. The ongoing commercial carpet-bombing of kids through a range of
ever-expanding technologies — that make possible new social networks and in-
formation flows — is aggressively commodifying every aspect of their lives. Not
to address this and make it pedagogically problematic, not to interrogate the
massive violence kids are exposed to through screen culture and the new digital
technologies, is to do an enormous disservice to the way in which young people
are being educated by the wider culture.

SK: But young people are resisting, in various ways. You obviously were in-
spired to write your latest book because you believe youth have a role to play in
fighting and changing the system.

HG: As someone from the generation of the '60s, I'm enormously inspired
by what they're doing. Right now they may be the only chance that we
have. Consider their courage: the bravery of these young kids in Occupy
Wall Street, fighting against state-sanctioned violence in the form of police
pepper spray, police dragging them off to jail and arresting them en masse.
They've become a model for what it is to stand up to this one percent that has
turned the U.S. into an authoritarian society. I think that what these kids
are doing is not only producing a new language to talk about inequality and
power relations in the U.S., but they're actually trying to create public spaces
where new forms of social relationships, inspired by democratic and coop-
erative values, are really becoming meaningful. These young people are re-
thinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what

The Mind's Eye 73

Seth Kershner

democracy is, and why it no longer exists in many capitalist countries across
the globe. They have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality,
and democracy, and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them
expendable, but they are also arguing for a collective future very different
from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems
in which they feel trapped. That's important.

But they face enormous challenges. They don't have access to the domi-
nant media. They're trying to use new media to create new modes of com-
munication. They're trying to understand what democratic processes might
mean in terms of sustaining collective struggles, and all of this takes time.
I think that rather than saying that Occupy Wall Street has died, we can say
that they're in the process of understanding what the long march through
alternative institutions might mean.

As conditions get worse in the U.S., this movement will grow and take
on an international significance. Hopefully they'll join with young people
in other countries to figure out how to address the biggest problem that the
global community faces — politics is local and power is global. Nation-states
can't control the flow of capital; it's outside the boundaries of nation-states.
So, we need a politics that's global to be able to deal with that.

SK: In reflecting on my own research, I've seen examples of school adminis-
trators treating student activists in two distinctly different ways. In my area,
Western Massachusetts, for example, there are high school students who are
very heavily involved in organizing around issues of ecology and sustainability.
They lobby for locally grown foods to be served in the cafeteria, install small garden
plots for community members, school officials give them land on school property
to grow vegetables, and so on. But then you have the students in San Diego that
I mentioned before. Because they were fighting against the military presence in
their schools they were seen as agitators. School administrators and police would
conduct video surveillance of the students' marches, and one of their leaders was
prevented from taking part in the graduation ceremony with the rest of his class.
What might explain the differential response here?

HG: As long as these modes of resistance don't challenge relations of power,
that's fine with school officials and others in a position of authority. As long
as they're focused on students finding a happy spot in themselves, positive
thinking, that's fine. But as soon as they start talking about power, milita-
rization, inequality, racism — all those things that point to deep structural
problems — student resistance and dissent is viewed as exceeding its possi-

74 The Mind's Eye

Seth Kershner

bilities and limits. Just look at what happened in places like Arizona, where
these racist educators and politicians succeeded in banning ethnic studies.
When young people protested against their history, culture, and forms of
witnessing being excluded from the curriculum, they were labeled as crimi-
nals, communists, and agitators.

What is most important in terms of these youth movements is that you
have a lot of young people making connections, saying, "Look, you can't talk
about the rise in tuition unless you talk about the attack on the social state
and social protections. You can't talk about what's happening in education
unless you talk about the rise of the punishing state." In a place like Califor-
nia where more is spent on prisons than on education, clearly those connec-
tions are what give force to a generation of students who are simply refusing
to isolate these issues. It no longer makes sense to say that these are spoiled
kids who don't want to spend much for their education. These young people are
developing a conversation about society at large, calling into question its most
fundamentally oppressive economic, political, and educational structures.

Also, young people are recognizing that they're not going to find their voice
in the Democratic Party or in the existing labor unions. What they really need
to fight for are new mass and collective organizations that can call the entirety of
society into question and mobilize so as to develop the policies and institutions
that make a new and radically democratic society possible.

SK: Here's a paradox for you: How do you teach social change or resistance
to authority within public schools — institutions that many have criticized for
being authoritarian and resistant to change?

HG: You can't do it if you believe these institutions are so authoritarian that
there's simply no room for resistance. That's a mistake. Power is never so
overwhelming that there's no room for resistance. Power and the forms it
takes are always contradictory in different ways, and there is always some
room for resistance. What needs to be understood is the intensity of domi-
nant power in different contexts and how it can be named, understood, and
fought. The issue here is to seize upon the contradictions at work in these
institutions and to develop them in ways that make a difference. During
the '60s, the term for this was the long march through institutions, and the
reference had little to do with reform but with massive restructuring of the
instruments of democracy.

And we also need to impose a certain kind of responsibility upon adults
in the schools — whether they be social workers, university professors, or

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Seth Kershner

high school teachers. Clearly it's not enough to say they operate under ter-
rible burdens that make them voiceless. I understand those structural con-
ditions, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't resist either. That means they not
only have to promote particular kinds of pedagogies in their classrooms, but
they also have to join social movements that give them the force of a collec-
tive voice that can bear down on these problems and create change.

The greatest battle that we're facing in the U.S. today is around the ques-
tion of consciousness. If people don't have an understanding of the nature
of the problems they face, they're going to succumb to the right-wing educa-
tional populist machine. This is a challenge that the Left has never taken se-
riously because it really doesn't understand that at the center of politics is the
question of pedagogy. Pedagogy is not marginal, it is not something that can
be reduced to a method, limited to what happens in high schools, or to what
college professors say in their classes. Pedagogy is fundamental not only
to the struggle over culture, but also, if not more importantly, the struggle
over meaning and identity. It's a struggle for consciousness, a struggle over
the gist of agency, if not the future itself— a struggle to convince people that
society is more than what it is, that the future doesn't simply have to mimic
the present.

SK: What would this look like in practice? One encouraging experiment I
had the privilege of observing up close is taking place at the Emiliano Zapata
Street Academy in Oakland. There, in an "alternative high school" within
the Oakland Unified School District, student interns working with a group
called BAY-Peace lead youth in interactive workshops on topics relevant to
their lives: street violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, military recruiters in
their schools, and so on.

HG: I think two things have to go on here, and you just mentioned one of them.
We've got to talk about alternative institutions. There has to be some way to
build institutions that provide a different model of education. On the Left, we
had this in the '20s and '30s: socialists had Sunday schools, they had camps;
they found alternative ways to educate a generation of young people to give them
a different understanding of history, of struggle. We need to reclaim that legacy,
update it for the 21st century, and join the fight over the creation of new modes
of thinking, acting, and engaging ourselves and our relations to others.

On the second level is what Rudi Dutschke called, and what I referred to
earlier, as the "long march through the institutions." It's a model that makes
a tactical claim to having one foot in and one foot out. You can't turn these

76 The Mind's Eye

Seth Kershner

established institutions over to the Right. You can't simply dismiss them
by saying they're nothing more than hegemonic institutions that oppress
people. That's a retreat from politics. You have to fight within these institu-
tions. Not only that, you have to create new public spheres.

SK: Henry, we've covered a lot of territory. Is there anything we haven't ad-
dressed that you would like to bring up before closing?

HG: We need both a language of critique and a language of hope. Critique is
essential to what we do, but it can never become so overwhelming that all we
become are critics and nothing else. It is counterproductive for the left to en-
gage in declarations of powerlessness, without creating as Jacques Ranciere
argues "new objects, forms, and spaces that thwart official expectations."
What we need to do is theorize, understand, and fight for a society that is
very different from the one in which we now live. That means taking seri-
ously the question of pedagogy as central to any notion of viable progressive
politics; it means working collectively with others to build social movements
that address a broader language of our society — questions of inequality and
power (basically the two most important issues we can talk about now.) And
I think that we need to find ways to support young people because the most
damage that's going to be done is going to be heaped upon the next genera-
tions. So what we're really fighting for is not just democracy; we're fighting
for the future. And so critique is not enough; we need a language of critique
and we need a language of possibility to be able to go forward with this.

Works cited

Harding, Scott, and Seth Kershner. "Students Against Militarism: Youth Or-
ganizing in the Counter- Recruitment Movement." Left Behind in the
Race to the Top: Realities of School Reform. Eds. Julie Gorlewski &
Brad Porfilio. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013, 257-
273. Print.

Lagotte, Brian W. "Gunning for School Space: Student Activists, the Military,

and Education Policy." Be the Change: Teacher, Activist, Global Citizen.

Ed. R. Verma. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010. 183-214. Print.
Mills, C. Wright. "The Cultural Apparatus." Power, Politics, and People: The

Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Ed. Louis Horowitz. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1963. 405-423. Print.

The Mind's Eye 77

Ben Jacques

78 The Mind's Eye

Gold and the

Nightwatchmans Daughter

BY BEN JACQUES

We are in a classroom at a Massachusetts state college, and we
are reading Walt Whitman. We began with "When I Heard the
Learned Astronomer," in which the poet abandons the lecture
hall for the open field to gaze directly at the stars. Then, for one week, we read
"Song of Myself," Whitmans frank celebration of being alive. Its 52 free-form
stanzas form the heart of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Now seated around a long table, my students are taking turns reading
aloud Whitmans "Song for Occupations." In this six-part ode, the poet cel-
ebrates farmers, glassblowers, milkers, millers, iron workers, sail makers,
cooks, bakers, carpenters, masons, seamstresses and surgeons.
The poem is vibrant in detail, cataloging both labors and tools:

The pump, the piledriver, the great derrick . . the coalkiln and brick-
kiln, I Ironworks or whiteleadworks . . the sugarhouse. . steam-saws . .
The cylinder press . . the handpress . . thefrisket and tympan . . the
compositor's stick and rule.

The Mind's Eye 79

Ben Jacques

But why should we care? I ask my students during a pause in the read-
ing — themselves sons and daughters of mechanics, retailers, nurses, accoun-
tants, teachers, office workers, technicians, truck drivers, and social workers.

The room is quiet, but not because my students don't know the answer.
"Because it all matters," a young woman finally responds. "Our lives and what
we do matter."

She has, of course, identified the central and centering theme of Whit-
man's poems: the immeasurable value of human beings, regardless of class,
gender, race, religion, or occupation. Aware of society's prejudices, Whitman
will return to this theme again and again.

7s it you then that thought yourself less? Whitman asks in the first stanza
of the poem.* 7s it you that thought the President greater than you? Or the rich
better off than you? Or the educated wiser than you?

If so, Whitman has something to teach us: 7 bring what you much need, yet
always have, I Bring not money or amours or dress or eating .... but I bring as
good.

What he brings is not a matter of analysis or textbooks: It eludes discus-
sion and print, I It is not to be put in a book . . . it is not in this book.
In the cadences of a preacher he continues:

You may read in many languages and read nothing about it; I You may
read the President's message and read nothing about it there: I Nothing
in the reports from the state department or treasury department ....
or in the daily papers or the weekly papers, I Or in the census returns
or assessor's returns or prices current or any accounts of stock.

As a student reads, I can almost hear Whitman whispering: The sum of all
known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are; I The President is up
there in the White House for you . ... it is not you who are here for him.

What Whitman offers in this poem is the gift of ourselves and those
around us, an acceptance enriched by his democratic vista. In line after line
he reminds us that we are, ourselves, the goal of science, art, laws, politics,
commerce — and, yes, education.

It's a good lesson for students in public colleges and universities, because
it affirms them in a society prone to elitism. And it's a tender reminder that
happiness is not tied to wealth, but to other human beings.

Whitman closes "A Song for Occupations" with an elegant affirmation.
Praising the singer over the psalm, the preacher over the sermon, the carpen-
ter over the pulpit he carved, he exclaims:

80 The Mind's Eye

Ben Jacques

When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and
child convince, I When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the
nightwatchman's daughter ... 7 intend to reach them my hand and
make as much of them as I do of men and women.

But now our hour in the classroom is up, and hands are closing the thick
Penguin edition of Leaves of Grass, gathering papers and backpacks. As my
students depart, I notice the far-away look in the eyes of one, and glimpse in
another's mischievous expression the smile of the nightwatchman's daughter.

This essay first appeared in MTA Today, Oct/Nov edition, 2005.

The Mind's Eye 81

Advice to Students
or

You Deserve the Fairy Wings

BY MELISSA QUIRK CAIRNS

The following poem was written by an area slam poet and local high
school English teacher as advice for students who have stopped believ-
ing in themselves. Bits and pieces of experiences with specific students
have found their way into this spoken word poem:

When you stand there

With your voice shoved with your fists

deep into your back pockets

when you stand there

denying your pain (and your potential)

You plant your feet
And your heart
In the dank earth
Without hope of anything
Growing there
But with the simple desire
To hide it
In the dark

Bury it under your
Fears and
Anger and
Self doubt

82 The Mind's Eye

Melissa Quirk Cairns

It is then
That I want to
Grab you
To pick you up
And shake you

To wake up that snow globe of dreams
And set you down gently
So that you can see

Because when your feet are on the ground
And your dreams are in the air
And all around

Like firefly fairies sparkling past in their shooting star patterns
When you shift your vision to allow yourself to see this new dimension
When you change the "reality" from what IS
To what CAN BE

Then You can fly

You can strap those dreams like fairy wings
Around your shoulders

And find release from the stagnation you're anchored to
Play

You can, you know

And, no, it's not just some Anthony Robbins

Life coaching seminar

The "if you believe it you can achieve it"

But

Well, okay, maybe it is a little

Because here's the thing I know is true:

I see the success already alive in you

It's hiding in the shadows of your self-doubt and fear

Buried under days of hiding your mom's liquor and

Cutting your arms so you don't feel the pain

Of missing your dad or feeling the shame

Of not being everything you think you're supposed to be

The Mind's Eye 83

Melissa Quirk Cairns

It's buried
I get it.

But it's still there, darlin,
It's still there

Waiting for you to tap into it

I see it in the bottomless wells of your eyes
Pools of possibility

You don't know it yet, but the choice is yours

YOU have a say in how your life goes

Believe me, if just for today:

You have a SAY in how your life goes

And I know that the road is long
And I know that it's not always easy

And I know that the "right" thing to do isn't always the choice you want to
make

And I know that some days the call of the razor to forearm is louder than your
own voice

And that voice in your head

sometimes that voice whispers dark thoughts

Pouring them like Claudius' poison into your ear

And I know that sometimes the best you can do is trade the razor in for a
Sharpie and mark yourself with lines
Of poetry
Of sadness
Of defeat

But
You

Have it in you

It's already there

So put on those fairy wings
To fly long enough

84 The Mind's Eye

Melissa Quirk Cairns

To see beyond the immediate landscape
High enough

To feel the winds change direction
To see the clouds from above
To see your Self
Below

And cradle her with your view
Love her from above

And know

You have it in you

To make the change you see

Your power is greater
Than your surroundings

The Mind's Eye 85

Four Prose Poems

BY ANNIE RASKIN

None of the following four prose poems are specifically "about" teaching
and learning, yet so much of each is given to us far from the classroom,
and often when we least expect it. I am fascinated by the Buddhist
concept of the harsh angel, the often unrecognized teacher in our
lives, invisible while present, and often unrecognized, the teacher that
prompts us to listen and look with alertness and intensity while plow-
ing through hurt, grief, loneliness, confusion, illness, even outrage, the
teacher that asks of us a new openness, a new understanding, perhaps
an acceptance, perhaps even joy, however painful, complex, or simply
puzzling the lesson may be.

Lessons

He holds her close as she puckers up and leans into his handsome face, his
lean, tanned, muscled body. His lips are parted. His Army buddy leans in
awkwardly from the right hand corner of the black and white snapshot, far
too eagerly watching the kissing lesson on the summer-lit beach. She is one
year old.

Years later the father taught her to fish. All good fishermen clean their own
catch: Slit the belly from anal vent to gills. Gut them. Cut off their heads.
Strip off the gills. Rinse the body cavity. Skin perch. Scale pickerel. Skin
bullheads. Scale bass or skin it. Leave the hallowed brook trout hollowed

86 The Mind's Eye

Annie Raskin

and whole. Scales flew high and stuck to the walls; the cat crunched in bliss
on the fish heads tossed her way; livers, hearts, stomachs and guts, pillows
of roe, sawed-off fins and flayed skin carelessly dispatched in a heap on the
day-old newspapers laid out next to the sink. She snatched up smooth chalk
white lobes for closer study. Milt, the father told her. That's how you know it's
a male. Roe is the eggs, the mother's eggs — each tiny globule, each fish-to-be
distinct if she looked close enough. This other nearly formless mass is what
the father makes: slippery, chalk white, solidly fluid. He sprays it on the eggs
floating in the water. Just firm enough to hold in her hand, a sac thinner than
skin but tough as the membrane that makes a too-fresh hard-boiled egg so
tricky to peel.

More years later the father again taught her to kiss. That's not a kiss, he told
her. Soften your lips. She did as he ordered. Somewhere in those same years
the mother taught her to make a pale pudding called junket. The mother
poured it into fluted glass dishes lined up on the kitchen windowsill to set.
Sweet and smooth as a kiss, milk-white as death, she did love its feel in her
mouth. It barely trembled in the dish if she touched it gently with a finger.
Surface tension held it so. When she put her spoon into the junket, it began
slowly to ooze water around the spoon's hole, intact only if untouched. Rennet,
the father explained, from the lining of a dead calf's stomach. No real danger
here, only offal in its own way.

Birthing the Rocks

Maples shade this back yard. Five looming maples. Last fall men climbed and
clung in a balletic tour de force to lop away the bottommost limbs. Still, shade
is everywhere; sun only dapples at high noon. Holes I try to dig for planting
shade-loving Hosta reveal roots thick as my wrist. My shovel bent on moving
maple roots thuds dully. There is no shifting them from their fiercely insistent
grip on this turf I wish simply to share. Only the small, tinny plink when the
point of my shovel finds unyielding shape tells me a stone sleeps deeply, tells
me that here, in this place, I can plant. Here, in this place, a rock older than
time I can fathom rests in soundless sentience. I do not awaken these rocks
too quickly. They ought not to be harshly hustled from their underworldly

The Mind's Eye 87

Annie Raskin

quiet. My shovel blindly feels its way, seeking that slim margin between rock
and soil gracious enough to cede a rim of space, the rock not yet ready to
shudder or shift, but only to suggest the curving compliance of a child side-
sleeping, perhaps preparing to slowly stir from the depth and the dark and
the dreaming. Sliding the tip along the stone's belly I circle and lean, letting
the rock have its silent way with me when just like that a channel opens with
a lurch as if tenacity were broken, primal connection loosed. Disquieted, I
kneel to stroke its bulk, sense its weight. What is it I have disturbed - what
the origin, what the form. What the unknowable wisdom of its presence now,
here in this one place. Precambrian roots at the core of the Green Mountains,
560 million years before this present day, before this ordinary steamy summer
day in July, before this day, three summers into this garden becoming so
gradually my garden. Who the witnesses.What the glacial force that wrestled
and wore these rocks of granite, quartz, and gneiss to skin-smooth eggs of
dinosaur dimension. What they mean to me.

Dysgeographica

She traces the impenetrable code of lines and loops to nowhere; north, south,
east, west hold no meaning. She touches route numbers with her index finger;
they multiply and mingle and confuse each other. Static blue-colored bodies
of water briefly reassure, but there are too many. Even if she could find this
lake on her map, this lake where she reluctantly takes swimming lessons when
she already knows how to swim, where each day during free period she rows a
boat all by herself far enough out in this bogus lake to make this summer camp
look tiny and alien, it would not help her find her lake. Toasted pine needles
in the patchy sun on the floor of paths from her cabin to the lake or the dining
hall mime the warm spicy smell of pine needle littered paths at home. Each
day after lunch she stalks the yellow route lines during rest hour on her top
bunk. She listens to the counterfeit crows caterwauling. Whenever she can,
she sits at the shore to look over this lake to the baffling mountains beyond
it. There are no mountains anywhere near her lake. She isn't accustomed to
mountains. They block her way home. They loom. They gaze back at her.
They move closer every day. She is in the wrong place; it's the wrong map.

88 The Mind's Eye

Annie Raskin

If she were to run her fingers over the mother's face, trace the territory
between lips and lines and loops that carry the mother's disappointment all
the way to her eyes, eyes like small lakes after hard rain pellets have muddied
up the water, she would still have no way to know if she were home. The
terrain of the father's being is a map she reads with all her senses, but to no
avail. Wherever it is that his directions point, they each lead to the same fierce
blazing hot sun that loves her and burns her all at once. She smells the heat
surrounding him, feels the waves of his intemperate temper, but fails to find
where the fit falls. The mother and the father: as cryptic and confusing as
road upon road, route numbers, and never-ending lakes as they drive with
their illegible faces over illegible mountains to leave her in this illegible place
with only a promise to come back. A promise. Untranslatable maps. She is
powerless to grasp the way, to conjure up the long path from here to there
beyond the mountains' stare to the place of uncertain love where longing
cannot rest.

What She Knows

Two or three nestle deep underneath a corner of the worn granite millwheel
used as a step at the back end of the 18 th century farmhouse. Salamanders.
So still they seem dead. They are not. She knows. They won't move until she
picks them up, until they rest in the curve of her palm. Even then they move
as if waking up for the first time, as if they are only now being born, slowly
gathering themselves into themselves, less an actual movement than a feeling
in her hand of things on the inside turning on as if she has pushed a button
that isn't there. Sleepy salamanders: helpless, dormant salamanders. Dark
red salamanders with deeper red spots. Grey-blue salamanders with bright
yellow spots. Dusky black ones with no spots. The red ones are newts. She
knows this because she heard the farmer across the street telling his son there
were red-spotted newts under the hen house. She turns them over, looks
carefully at their under parts, their short legs, their sticky toes. She studies
their quietness, their stillness; they may be spellbound in a fairy tale. Their
eyes are slits that blink without opening. From where do they come? Are they
scared or only awaiting a sign to awaken under the heavy millstone? Maybe

The Mind's Eye 89

Annie Raskin

it's simple: they like it here under the smooth weight of the old stone, in the
cool absence of light, in the damp-dark musty safety of it. She wants to know
what their names are in the book that gives names to salamanders. She wants
to know if they get bigger, or if they stay small, and where they go when it's
winter. She asks no one; they are her secret. She knows that she needs to
know.

90 The Mind's Eye

Educators

(In honor of my mother)

BY AKILI CARTER

I go forward armed with the lessons of many educators

From professors to parents to ex-wives to current fiancees

Life lessons have been drilled into my school while I was wide awake

The answers to so many questions that have yet to be asked

The most amazing education is the one you get at the hospital

At 8 o'clock in the morning when your first child is being born

You learn about your gumption as a man and a woman

You figure out if you are ready to sculpt and mold a young human being

As a father and as a mother

The second-greatest lesson you get is when you watch your parent being laid
into the ground

Yes, they have given you the foundation for greatness, but you still are never
ready

For that type of loss and to handle that grief

When you are arguing with them about a lesson whether mini or profound
You are not thinking that what they are saying is out of love
What is an educator or a teacher, or education and learning without context?
The proper box for you to put your stackables of life into is very important
But I digress; I started this poem wanting to answer a question about education
What is education? What is a teacher?

Well, your education is ongoing and non-stop, from cradle to grave
What is a teacher? My mom, dad, fiancee, children, and family
Hopefully, one day, when this topic is being written about by my children
They will say, my dad was a teacher

And I hope someone will reply that everyone is a teacher in their own way
The thing I want to ask is, are the lessons worth learning?

The Mind's Eye 91

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Akili Carter

Akili Carter is a social worker from Long Island, New York. He has two
children, Ayanna and Devon, and is an MCLA alum. A student-athlete who
played basketball for the mens team, he majored in history and English. Akili
is completing his fourth collection of poetry called Shattered Mirrors.

Glenn A. Crosby

Glenn A. Crosby is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chemical
Physics at Concordia University in Irvine, CA, and an Emeritus Professor of
Chemistry and Materials Science at Washington State University.

Dale Borman Fink

Dale Borman Fink, Ph.D., came to MCLA after 35 years in childcare, early
childhood education, out-of-school time care, and research and training re-
lated to children with disabilities and their families. Among his books are
Making a Place for Kids with Disabilities (2000), Control the Climate, Not the
Children: Discipline in School Age Care (1995), and a children's book, Mr. Sil-
ver and Mrs. Gold (1980). He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Har-
vard University, a Master's degree in early childhood education from Antioch
University, and a Ph.D. in special education from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. Fink is an assistant professor at MCLA, where he
teaches courses in early childhood education, special education, and chil-
dren's literature.

Gideon Fink Shapiro

Gideon Fink Shapiro is a doctoral candidate in architecture history and the-
ory at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. His dissertation re-
search concerns the landscape architecture and engineering of public parks
in 19th-century Paris. His writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians, Architect, Abitare, Clog, Crit, Domus, the Guggen-

92 The Mind's Eye

About the Authors

heim Lab\log, and other publications. He worked for four years in the design
office of Gabellini Sheppard Associates, and has collaborated on public art
installations with Brooklyn-based Amorphic Robot Works, as well as with
the composer Simon Fink. He served as research assistant to curator Aaron
Betsky, and authored the mobile phone-based Domus guide to New York ar-
chitecture.

Tony Gengarelly

Tony Gengarelly, Ph.D., is a professor of art history and museum studies at
MCLA, where he has taught for more than forty years. He has written and
published on a variety of subjects, including Native American painting and
Outsider Art. Most noteworthy are articles for the Folk Art Messenger and
publications on American poster art, Maurice Prendergast, and American
landscape painting. Gengarelly has curated, individually or with his students,
over 30 exhibitions. Several have been featured at the Clark Art Institute,
Williams College Museum of Art, and MCLA Gallery 51. For the past nine
years he has been the director of the Jessica Park Project, an educational and
professional program at MCLA.

Ben Jacques

A teacher, poet and free-lance writer, Ben Jacques has written for publications
ranging from The Christian Science Monitor to Americas magazine. Several of
his poems and essays have appeared in The Mind's Eye. One of his signature
courses in his 23-year tenure at MCLA is "Whitman and the New World Po-
ets" — a study of distinctively American voices, including William Carlos Wil-
liams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Allan Ginsberg,
and Pablo Neruda.

Seth Kershner

Seth Kershner has taught Spanish at MCLA and Berkshire Community Col-
lege (BCC). He is currently the Public Services/Reference Librarian at North-
western Connecticut Community College. His articles and interviews have
been published in Sojourners, Fellowship, and Z Magazine. With Scott Hard-
ing, he is co-author of "Just Say No: Organizing Against Militarism in Public
Schools," which was published in 2011 in the Journal of Sociology and Social
Welfare. He and Harding are among a handful of researchers examining the
grassroots "counter-recruitment" movement in the U.S. and are currently
writing a book on the topic.

The Mind's Eye 93

About the Authors

Melissa Quirk Cairns

Melissa is a poet, actor, director, and teacher in Berkshire County. She has
performed her poetry as a feature artist as a part of the 10X10 Poetry se-
ries and the Greenfield Word Festival, and recently had the pleasure of being
invited to read and be interviewed for Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's Indiefeed
Performance Poetry podcast "Live from the Amy Clampitt House." In addi-
tion, Melissa has competed in several poetry slams across Berkshire County
including the WordxWord Poetry Slam and the Western Mass. Champion-
ships. She can frequently be found on the Tuesday Night Project stage at Y
Bar as a poet, storyteller, or emcee. Melissa graduated from Mount Holyoke
College, earned her Masters degree at Lesley University, and is an alumna
corps member of Teach for America. She currently teaches English at Drury
High School in North Adams, MA, where she lives with her husband and two
cats, Atticus and Boo.

Annie Raskin

Annie Raskin teaches literature courses at MCLA, including those on the
graphic novel, metafiction, and 19 th century American women regionalist
writers. She previously taught at the State University of New York at Albany,
where she was awarded a Ph.D. in 2004. She published an essay, "Hawthorne
and the Daguerreotype: Portraits Gleaned from the Sun," in The Mind's Eye
of spring 2005. She has published a number of op-ed essays in The Berkshire
Eagle, as well as poetry in The Berkshire Review and in The Prose Poem Project.
The four prose poems in this volume of The Mind's Eye are part of a manu-
script in progress with a working title of Eros & Place.

Gregory Scheckler

In addition to being a fine art painter and photographer, Gregory Scheckler
worked as a toy wrangler, floor refinisher, plasma donor, camp counselor, la-
trine cleaner, onion cutter, antique restorer, typesetter, book store clerk and
later, an art professor. He resides in Williamstown, MA, where he often can be
found hiking, skiing, and biking the fair slopes of the Berkshires.

Nick Stroud

Nick Stroud is an assistant professor of science and technology education at
MCLA, where he teaches courses in education and physics. His academic in-
terests include creating links between learning science in and out of school, as

94 The Mind's Eye

well as developing the science knowledge and practices of future teachers. He
also enjoys spending time outdoors throughout the year with his family. He
holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University Teachers College.

Jennifer Zoltanski

Jennifer Zoltanski holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University, a
Master of Science degree in sociology from Portland State University and
a Bachelor of Arts degree in French from the University of Denver. Her re-
search focuses on prosecution of war crimes and genocide by the Yugoslav
and Rwandan Tribunals alongside transnational mobilization against war-re-
lated gender violence. As an assistant professor of sociology at MCLA, Jenni-
fer teaches classes on criminology genocide, law and society, social problems,
social stratification, and social movements. She received the MCLA Faculty
Curriculum Development Award (2012) for "The Sociology of Happiness."
She serves on The Mind's Eye editorial board. In her spare time, Jennifer en-
joys hiking with her dog Amber and playing the ukulele.

The Mind's Eye 95

Forthcoming Issues

The editors are working on a number of themes for publication. See the themes
below for more information about each issue.

If you wish to discuss or submit an article, piece of fiction, poetry, or work of art
in a specific issue, or have suggestions for themes of future issues, please contact us as
soon as possible at f.jones-sneed@mcla.edu.

The Mind's Eye also will continue to publish "general articles" on liberal arts-
related topics that do not fall under the themes.

Main theme Submission deadline Publication date

Commemorative Issue January 7, 2014 September 2014

Civil Rights April 15, 2014 To be confirmed

Art and Culture January 7, 2015 September 2015

Environmental Issues April 15, 2015 To be confirmed

Writer's Guidelines

Submissions should adhere to these guidelines:

1. Submit unpublished manuscripts both on paper and on CD, using either PC or MAC
platform word-processing programs. Manuscripts should be typed double spaced and
printed on one side of the paper only. List your name, address, phone number and e-
mail address, if available, on the cover sheet, with your name at the top of each page.

2. We will consider simultaneous submissions under the provision that the author notify
us of this and contact us immediately if the material is accepted elsewhere.

3. If you wish your manuscript and disk returned, please enclose a return self-addressed
envelope. If it is to be mailed off campus, attach sufficient postage. While we make
every attempt to safeguard your manuscript and disk, we cannot be held responsible
for their loss.

4. Use MLA style, with in- text references, as appropriate to the content and disciplinary
approach of your article (see MLA Style Manual for guidelines).

5. Please include a word count.

6. While we will consider articles of unspecified length, preference is given to articles
fewer than 20 pages long.

7. We reserve the right to edit for clarity and accuracy.

8. We will consider one-color artwork (e.g., photographs, line drawings, woodcuts).

9. Payment will be made in contributor s copies.

The Minds Eye
Frances Jones- Sneed, Managing Editor
Submit your manuscript to: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

375 Church St., North Adams, MA 01247
For queries: f.jones-sneed@mcla.edu

96 The Mind's Eye